Archimandrite Shafiq Abouzayd hoped that a new government would respect “the mosaic status of Syria with different religions and social ideologies”, as Abigail Frymann Rouch writes in The Tablet.
A priest ministering to Syrian Christians in London said that those remaining in Syria were fearful at the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and that some were trying to flee.
Archimandrite Shafiq Abouzayd, a Lebanese priest who serves the nearly 1,000 Melkite Catholics in the dioceses of Westminster and Southwark, said that many of the Syrians among them were in constant contact with their families. “Of course, a lot of them are worried, they don’t know what will happen next,” he told The Tablet.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant, which led the rebel coalition which toppled Assad’s government over weekend, has been designated a terror group by the UK government since 2017.
The group’s leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani has pledged to honour the country’s religious and ethnic diversity.
“Aleppo has always been a meeting point for civilisations and cultures, and it will remain so, with a long history of cultural and religious diversity,” he said in a statement on the Telegram messaging platform after the city fell to his forces last week.
He also told Christians in the city that that his forces would “ensure your protection and safeguard your property”.
Abouzayd welcomed Jolani’s words, but said: “We need a proper army. We need a proper government, a proper president. Relying on one person is not enough, because it is a complex war between different super-powers and local powers.”
He noted the “ambiguous” roles played by Assad’s allies in Russia and Iran, as well as the US and Turkish governments which had at various points backed the rebels.
Asked whether the fall of Assad, who had styled himself as a protector of minorities, was good for Syria, Abouzayd said it could be if elections took place in the next few months and the incoming government respected “the mosaic status of Syria with different religions and social ideologies”.
However, if it were to comprise fanatics “like Al-Qaeda and ISIS and so on, we will definitely suffer a lot, as it happened after the departure of Saddam Hussein”. He added that “there is not one colour for these Islamists”, and how they behaved depended on their leadership and whoever was funding them.
He said a mass exodus of Christians, as has happened from Iraq since 2003, was unlikely. He pointed out that Jordan had closed its border crossing from Syria, while instability in Lebanon and Iraq made them unattractive options for emigrants. He said it was no longer possible to acquire visas for European countries or the US and Turkey wanted to bid farewell to the more than three million Syrian refugees there rather than welcome more.
In the first years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, Syria took in some of the Iraqi Christians fleeing the chaos that erupted after Saddam Hussein was removed from power. However, since the start of Syria’s civil war in 2011, the Christian population has shrunk from around 10 per cent to two per cent of the population – around 300,000 – due to political and economic instability.
Fresh in the minds of Syrian Christians are the years in which ISIS controlled eastern areas of their country, proclaiming them and parts of northern Iraq a caliphate in which Christians could pay protection money, convert, flee or risk death. One priest – Fr François Murad – was shot dead, and more than 200 lay people were abducted.
In 2013 Islamists kidnapped Metropolitan Youhanna Ibrahim and Metropolitan Pavlos Yazigi, respectively the Syriac Orthodox and Greek Orthodox Archbishops of Aleppo. Both are believed to have been killed.
