The church bells still ring in Syria’s ancient Christian enclaves, but their sound carries a bittersweet resonance. Two weeks after the surprise fall of the regime of the Syrian tyrant, Bashar Al-Assad — toppled by an offensive spearheaded by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — Syrian Christians stand at a crossroads of hope and dread.
Promises of equality and protection from the new authorities have been met with cautious optimism. Yet fears of persecution and the erasure of a millennia-old Christian presence linger. For a community that has weathered centuries of upheaval, this moment feels as fragile as the cracked stone of their oldest churches, a nation reborn, but under whose terms?
Christians were protected under the Assad regime. Consequently some regard them as complicit in regime crimes.
