All Too Horrifically Real

Martin Parsons writes:

In the last week of November Syrian rebels led by the Salafist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched a surprise attack on Aleppo. By 8 December Damascus had fallen and the Assad regime had fled, leaving HTS in control of the major cities in the west of the country.

People flocked onto the streets to celebrate the fall of the dictator who ran an authoritarian state which ruthlessly exterminated tens of thousands of its opponents, Syrian exiles began flooding back to the country. The BBC has begun to describe HTS not as a jihadist group with roots in al-Qaeda, but as an Islamist group, implying that somehow they have now renounced violence, although it is somewhat difficult to see what evidence there is for that. But there was one group which was far less certain of their future and are now wondering whether to flee the country for their own safety — Syria’s Christians.

The Christian Church in Syria literally dates back to the very first decades of Christianity. By the time of the Apostle Paul’s conversion in the early 30s CE, there was already a church in Damascus. Saul as he was then known, was in fact, on route to persecute them when, according to the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 9) he experienced the blinding light and voice from heaven which turned him from persecutor to preacher of Christianity.

No-one knows quite how many Christians there currently are in Syria. The last census was in the 1960s, but before the Syrian civil war they were widely estimated to be between 5 and 10 percent of Syria’s 22 million population. Many fled the widespread abductions, murder and religious cleansing which almost exactly 10 years ago, the US State Department officially described as “genocide”. However, we are certainly talking about at least several hundred thousand Christians currently in Syria.

When the US led invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam Hussein’s government in 2003, HTS’ now leader Abu Mohammed al-Julani (real name: Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa) immediately travelled to Iraq to join al-Qaeda in Iraq. By 2006 along with other captured jihadists he was in a prison which seems to have acted as something of a jihadist think-tank. On his release he was sent back to Syria with the task of establishing an al-Qaeda branch there, which he duly did under the name Jabhat al-Nusra (the al-Nusra Front). In 2013 when Islamic State split from al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Julani maintained his links with al-Qaeda and although in 2016 when the al-Nusra front evolved into HTS, it ceased to publicly claim to be affiliated with al-Qaeda.

When the Syrian Civil War began, Christians weren’t initially targeted. However, in April 2013 Bishop Yohanna Ibrahim, head of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Aleppo, and Bishop Boulos Yaziji, head of the Greek Orthodox Church were both abducted. No-one knows what actually happened to them, but the al-Nusra Front were widely thought to be behind their abduction and murder. What is clear is that those events were shortly followed by a widespread pattern of abductions, murder, rape and religious cleansing of Syrian Christians. I well remember being with a Syrian Christian leader at that time who showed me a picture which had just been sent to him from Syria — of a Christian mother and her child both hung from the same rope by jihadists.

When the four-year long siege of Aleppo was finally ended in 2016, the ceasefire deal allowed HTS and other jihadist groups to be bussed to rebel-held Idlib province. There, al-Julani announced the merger of his al-Nusra front with other jihadist groups to form Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Organisation for the liberation of Greater Syria). It then began establishing an Islamic government with shari’a courts, including reportedly the death penalty for apostasy.

The media savvy jihadist

One of the most overlooked changes in jihadist behaviour over the past few years has been that they have become increasingly media savvy.

When the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1995-96 technology was almost a completely foreign language to them. When they re-took Kabul in 2021 they were incredibly media savvy and presented themselves as now being a moderate force that the West could work with. However, in August this year, almost exactly three years after their takeover, they promulgated a new law for the promotion of virtue and the suppression of vice. This enforces attendance at daily Islamic prayers and bans anything — literally anything including Afghan cultural festivals and children’s games — which is not specifically Islamic.

HTS’ leader al-Julani is actually more media savvy than most, in fact, before joining al-Qaeda in Iraq he was studying Media Studies. He saw what happened to al-Qaeda in Iraq when it toppled the authoritarian dictator there, and knows he needs to avoid making the same mistakes. In particular, he knows that to establish his stated goal of creating a “pioneering” Islamic state in Syria he both needs to avoid Western military intervention, and also will need Western aid and trade if his government is to survive.

So, he says one thing to his jihadis supporters, but to Western audiences he says things they will interpret as meaning he is a “moderate” who will respect the rights of minorities.

By all accounts his media strategy is currently being pretty successful. Even the BBC, have created a cloud of confusion by referring to HTS as now being an “Islamist” organisation with “jihadist” roots. But let’s be clear, the difference between those terms is about how one achieves their shared goal of an Islamic government with shari’a enforcement for Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Islamists seek to use the democratic process as a one-way street to achieve that end, while jihadists seek to topple the existing government through armed attacks. So, by any reasonable definition of their actions over the past few weeks, HTS are a jihadist organisation.

So, the real question is what is their ideology? Perhaps the best clue to that is the propaganda HTS put out to its supporters at the end of November just as they launched their surprise attack. This promised three things: suicide bombings and the fall of Aleppo and the fall of Damascus.

In 2014 during his first televised interview al-Julani told Al Jazeera that Syria should be ruled under his group’s interpretation of “Islamic law” and the country’s minorities, such as Christians and Alawis would not be accommodated.

What he has said since then sounds much more irenic to western audiences, but doesn’t actually change the substance. In an interview with CNN’s Arabic service two days before HTS fighters swept into Damascus he described HTS rule in Idlib as a model for what minorities should expect:

In Idlib, there are minorities like Christians and Druze, and they have been safe, thank God. There were some attacks against them by individuals when there was anarchy, and we did right by them and restored their property to them.

He went on to say:

The law will protect us, them, and their rights. The important thing is to move on to be governed by law that will protect everybody’s rights.

The law he is talking about is of course shari’a and the “rights” for Christians and other minorities are those set down by shari’a. This divides the earth into the world governed by Islamic law and government (Dar al-Islam) and the rest which is referred to as “the world of war” (Dar al-Harb). The latter must be invited (da’wa) to embrace Islam including Islamic government and where this is refused jihad must be waged to enforce it.

When an area becomes subject to Islamic government, Christians are given the options of conversion to Islam, dhimmitude or execution, with exile being an alternative that the Islamic ruler can impose instead at his discretion.

Although some Western liberals have sought to portray dhimmitude as a form of toleration, it is effectively a non-citizen status, not wholly dissimilar to that which the Nuremberg decrees enforced on German Jews. Dhimmis are permitted to “live” subject to keeping a strict set of rules based on the so called “Pact of Umar”, which Umar the second Caliph reputedly enforced on the Christians of Syria. Whilst these permit Christians to worship — it is only behind closed doors; no Christian books or symbols such as the cross must be visible to non-Muslims; and while Christians are permitted to retain existing churches — they are forbidden from even repairing them, let alone building new ones. But perhaps the most telling part is that any perceived breach of these conditions renders the dhimmi an enemy (harbi) who may be killed with impunity by any Muslim. It is a status which middle eastern Christians lived under for centuries with any perceived breach of the dhimmi code leading to execution and in some instances massacres of entire Christian communities numbering thousands.

So, when HTS’ leader al-Julani promises a new constitution with rights for minorities based on law, he is referring to the “rights” given to dhimmis in shari’a. This is exactly what we saw a decade ago, when Islamic State in 2015 forced Christians in the Syrian city of Qaryatayn to either convert or sign a dhimmi contract.

This is not a bright or tolerant future for Syrian Christians.

And Giles Fraser writes:

The small city of Al-Suqaylabiyah has long been an indicator of Christian-Muslim relations in Syria. And two days ago, masked militants doused the northern Syrian city’s Christmas tree in petrol and set it alight. The message is clear: Christians beware. Now, Christians all over Syria are nervously watching what happens next in Al-Suqaylabiyah; among other things, places like this are on the front line between two very different conceptions of God.

If you ask Sunday school children to draw a picture of God, you often get two sorts of images. The first is a cloudy scribble, generally pretty abstract and amorphous. It could be fire or a depiction of wind. This is God the unknowable. The second sort of image is of a kindly face, mostly a man with a beard. Sometimes a baby. People have killed each other over this difference, and continue to do so right up to this day. It’s a difference that gets to the theological heart of why Christians in Syria are so nervous about the return of Islamism. This is a Christmas story set against the violence of world events.

Idolatry is probably the number one thought crime in the Hebrew scriptures. God alone is worthy of worship, and to imbue divine status to anything less than God Almighty is a capital offence. “Show them no pity or compassion and do not shield them. But you shall surely kill them; your own hand shall be the first against them to execute them. Stone them to death” as the book Deuteronomy puts it. Judaism and Islam share a profound hostility to any kind of depiction of the divine; for them, the real God is unrepresentable. The second commandment prohibits the representation of God, and representational art is profoundly suspect. So, in many ways, Rothko is the archetypal Jewish artist. And Islam focuses a great deal of its visual aesthetic energy into calligraphy. At the extreme end of this scale are the fighters of Islamic State blowing up statues in Palmyra.

But Christianity works in a completely different way, and because of Christmas. For the mad idea that God is born into the world as a child, and grows up to be a man, introduces the thought that the Almighty has a face. That He has a certain look. And all of a sudden, permission seems to have been given for this look to be reproduced. As the Epistle of Colossians puts it, “Christ is the image of the invisible God”. And with that idea everything changes, especially for artists.

The Arab theologian St John of Damascus did the most to defend the use of images for Orthodox Christianity. St John was an Arab Christian, born in 675, and into a city that only 40 years previously had fallen to the Muslim army. It was here that he defended the use of icons, focusing his argument on the incarnation, the coming of God into the world as flesh. “And the word became flesh and dwelt among us,” he says in the familiar Christmas reading. Suddenly there is something specific you can draw. In fact the whole tradition of Western art, with its representations of the birth of Christ, and of the Cross, owes its existence to a little Syrian monk writing in the seventh century. Long before Islam, Syria was the place of St Paul’s conversion and baptism, one of the great cradles of the Church. And though Christians have been leaving Syria in droves since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, there is still a significant Christian population there.

In the centre of Damascus, along Straight Street, where St Paul rested after his traumatic conversion, a number of churches cluster together for security. They are all brimming with icons and images, twinkling with gold. These are identity markers for orthodox Christians. Far more than nice decorations, icons speak of the coming of God into the world. Not unlike the Eucharist for Catholics, they are sacramental, and represent what it is to be an Orthodox Christian. But to Islam, these images are an insult. And to radical Muslims of the Islamic State kind, an absolute abomination.

I left Syria in May 2015, and recall being driven at a ridiculous speed through the checkpoint into Lebanon to Beirut airport by a mad Syrian monk who had to get back for a service. It is the closest I have ever felt to death. Uninterested in the police who were attempting to flag him down through various concrete chicanes, he wound down the window to reveal his priestly robes — better than a passport, apparently. The fact that the Syrian police let him through was testament to the kind of relationship the Christian community had built up with Bashar al-Assad and his family. They didn’t like Assad, though they only whispered it, frightened like everyone else. But they were terrified of Islamic State. “Better Assad than ISIS” — I heard this several times. A few weeks after I left, ISIS detonated mines around the 2,000-year-old temples in Palmyra, out in the eastern Syrian desert. Their campaign against the idolatrous culture of the ancients was uninterested in pathetic Western cries of heritage. And now that Assad has gone, the Christian community are secretly terrified that this sort of Islamism is coming for them and their precious icons.

Not every Christian image in the churches of Straight Street is a beautiful icon. The Armenian Orthodox church has a representation of the Armenian Genocide in its courtyard, one of the most gruesome and disturbing images I have ever seen. It recalls the Turkish (then Ottoman) mass murder of its Armenian Christian population during the First World War. During that period, more than one million Armenian Christians were wiped out by the Turkish authorities. Many Armenian Christians were forced to convert to Islam, others were driven into the Syrian desert to die of starvation. This is why what is now Turkey, once a wellspring of Christianity, is now pretty much Christian-free. “Who now remembers the Armenian Genocide?” Hitler once said, as he prepared to copy it in his genocide of Jews. Mostly, we don’t remember. But they do in Damascus. This is where terrified Christians fled from Ottoman bayonets. And Christians on Straight Street keep the memory of those horrors alive to this day.

Will Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, and his Turkish backers, bring liberation as he seems to have promised, or further misery for the Christian community in Damascus? In truth, no one yet knows. For now, a huge Christmas tree is raised in Abbasiya Square in the city centre. The lights are on in Straight Street. Joy to the world. Even the first Christmas was set against dangerous world events, with Matthew telling of Herod ordering a massacre of children. This may feel like an old story to us. It is all too horrifically real to the Christians of Damascus.