Christianity under greater threat in ‘liberated’ Syria

Rebel fighters pose for a picture outside the mausoleum of Syria's late president Hafez al-Assad in the family's ancestral village of Qardaha in the western Latakia province on December 11. Picture: AAREF WATAD/AFP

Today we hear a lot about politics and ‘‘cultural’’ rifts in Australia. So how can we in the ‘‘West’’ understand the situation in the Middle East? There is a problem. We see everything in dry strategic political terms. But are we just talking about politics?

People in Australia and in the West in general have forgotten that it is religion, not politics, that is the prime motivating force for the majority of people in the world – for good or bad. But you might say, not in the ‘‘enlightened’’ secular West. Well, think again. The latest wave of anti-Jewish persecution and harassment is partly political, sparked by antipathy towards Israel, but it is also religious, and religious hatred is quite different from political antipathy towards a state for its policies. Religious hatred is in the psyche, because religion is. This is the origin of Islamic fundamentalism.

All over the world, the most persecuted religion is actually Christianity, especially today in Syria where the fault lines between Christianity and Islam have opened after the fall of Damascus with the fear of renewed Jihadist Islamism. Western political analysts have been wrong about the Middle East time and again. Why? Perhaps they do not really comprehend the religious mentality of the Middle East. They do not understand the real driving force behind Islamism. They often simply do not ‘‘get’’ the fact that religion is in your psyche, your very being. They believe in political reasons and always talk in geopolitical terms, but in the Middle East and particularly in Syria right now, jihadism is appearing in its most fundamental guise, so we lack comprehension of the motivations of the confusing warring factions. Many westerners want to swallow the Islamic Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) PR in Syria. No wonder that the Christians of Syria looking around at the dwindling number of their co-religionists in the Middle East are terrified.

John Eibner, International President of Christian Solidarity International, a Christian human rights organisation promoting religious liberty and human dignity, recently put out a lengthy statement warning of this naive ‘‘wishful thinking’’ approach after the fall of Damascus. Recalling the “Arab Spring” uprisings that were being projected in the Western media as the harbingers of a new peaceful, prosperous and democratic era for the Arab world, Eibner said:

“Thirteen years later, Syria, once a place of refuge for over a million escaping conflict in Iraq and elsewhere, where 40 per cent of the original population were members of protected religious minorities, has been transformed into one of the world’s worst man-made catastrophe zones. HTS’s ideology and history give religious minorities in Syria serious reason to doubt the promises of new found tolerance for religious minorities. The Alawites, Druzes, and Christians, the three primary religious minorities under threat. Both Alawites and Druzes are Muslim minority sects that the jihadists consider heretical …” and worthy of death.

He listed the Islamic atrocities against Christians:

“HTS has often targeted Christians throughout Syria in violent attacks and kidnappings, bombing churches and confiscating property. September 2013, Jabhat al-Nusra, the precursor to HTS, overran the Christian city of Ma’alua north of Damascus, kidnapping nuns and driving out the Christian population. They occupied the Christian town of Sadad in October 2013, killing at least 41 Christian civilians and using others as human shields. Aleppo, one of the Middle East’s most Christian cities, has been literally decimated. Out of a prewar population of 200,000 Christians about 20,000 Christians live in Aleppo today. When al-Nusra conquered Idlib province in 2015, nearly the entire Christian population of 10,000 fled. Others were killed or kidnapped, and their property confiscated. Only 300 Christians remain in Idlib today.”

It is easy to blame everything on the intransigence and brutality of the dictator Assad, as the propaganda of HTS has done. But although there was no political freedom under Assad, there was much personal and religious freedom and high educational standards. Nor was this conflict instigated by Syrians simply wanting freedom, as the propaganda would have us believe. In 2014 I interviewed sister Agnes Mariam, an erudite Syrian Carmelite nun who was part of the democracy movement which sparked the war. She said that Syrians wanted a new constitution and were hopeful Assad would bend. For a while it seemed as if he would and the demonstrations were organised and peaceful. But then, she said, “we started to see the foreigners at the demonstrations. They were foreign agitators who became Jihadist fighters, not the freedom-loving rebels of western media”.

Jihadists were used as proxies for the West to remove Russian and Iranian influence. The US backed a wide array of armed rebel groups, including jihadist groups such as HTS. While the Assad regime allowed more social freedom than in any other Arab country with a Sunni majority, HTS’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, is recognised by the US as a terrorist, and for good reason. According to CSI his loyal jihadists have killed, raped, tortured, looted and desecrated and al-Jolani has called his conquest of Damascus “a victory for the entire Islamic nation” – a development that was welcomed by the Taliban in the ‘‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’’.

Sadly, in the Middle East, where Christianity began, it is being snuffed out, which seems a secondary issue for the great Western powers. We have lost our own religious wellspring, and we do not understand our enemies’ wellspring.