Death’s Empire
East of Antioch and west of Aleppo, the land rises into limestone hill country. It was—until recently—empty, barren, and lonely but beautiful in the springtime, with flowers, green grass, and red earth contrasting with the gray of abandoned buildings. These are the “Dead Cities of Upper Syria,” as the French Jesuit scholar and explorer Father Joseph Mattern dubbed them in the 1920s, a once heavily populated zone of Byzantine Christian Syria until the seventh century.
It was not only populated but prosperous. The several hundred ruined settlements—towns and villages more than actual cities—are well built in stone, and the carving and artistry of acanthus leaves, bunches of grapes, geometric patterns, and monograms of Christ are of superb quality and mostly intact after more than thirteen centuries. A Greek inscription on one site, possibly a church, still reads, “You have given happiness to my heart. For our harvests of wheat, wine, and oil we are overflowing with peace. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.” The symbols of Christianity are everywhere in the Dead Cities, but there are no Christians. I once asked a Kurdish goatherd who he thought had built such splendid buildings, and he answered me in broken Arabic, “Saladin?”
Unlike the popular, exaggerated image of Muslim conquerors rampaging with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, the Syrian Christian inhabitants of the Dead Cities were not, as far as we know, massacred. They fled, or moved with all their portable belongings. The cataclysm that befell them was both political and economic. The Muslim conquest of Syria in the seventh century disrupted trade patterns in the Eastern Mediterranean for centuries. The Syrian olive oil that used to light lamps in France could no longer cross the sea. The Christians moved either north into a receding, defensive Byzantine Empire or east and south into the teeming, still mostly Christian, cities of Inner Syria that were now part of the Muslim Umayyad Caliphate that would stretch from Spain to the borders of China.
There are multiple connections between the long-empty region of the Dead Cities, mostly located inside the Syrian Governorate of Idlib, and the predicament of the Syrian Christians of today. What was once an empty region, beautiful but mostly abandoned, the abode of shepherds, became over the past decade a human dumping ground, a place of internal exile, as millions of Sunni Muslim Syrians were driven (literally driven in green buses) into the remaining rebel held Idlib region by the seemingly victorious Assad regime. With massive help from his Russian and Iranian allies, Assad would besiege a rebel held area in, say, the outskirts of Damascus, starve and bomb it into submission, and then allow the survivors to be transported to Idlib. Assad would then consolidate his rule over what the regime called “Useful Syria,” having cleansed it of political undesirables. Assad had plans, but, as the Muslims, quoting the Koran, say, “Allah is the best of planners.”
It seems that the Russians, Turks, and various Arab states had recently been negotiating some sort of deal over Syria that would have brought it in from the cold after thirteen years of brutal civil war. But the dictator Bashar al-Assad, the lesser, bloodier son of a brutal but more cunning father, balked at satisfying the negotiators.
Meanwhile, the mostly hardcore Islamist Syrian rebels under the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham or H.T.S.), allies of Turkey locked up in the Idlib pocket, had also been carefully planning for several years and in a lightning offensive unlike anything seen in Syria before captured most of the country in less than two weeks. When the first domino fell in Aleppo, Assad was cooling his heels in Moscow waiting to see Putin and had to rush home. By the time the capital of Damascus fell ten days later, Assad was on a plane back to Moscow.
Damascus fell on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a fact that some Syrian and Lebanese Christians regarded as miraculous—not because of any great love that they had for the rebels but because the conquest of Syria’s great cities had been achieved at very little cost in human life or property, Christian or non-Christian. Unlike Assad, the rebels didn’t need to reduce cities to moonscapes with heavy artillery and barrel bombs. The Christian—Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic—town of Mhardeh, a pro-regime town, long a thorn in the side of the rebels, negotiated a truce with them, as did other towns on the road to Damascus. The Christian commander of the pro-Assad militia in Mhardeh, Simon al-Wakil, reportedly fled Syria with his family.
At the end of the day, no one very much wanted to fight for Assad. He thought he had beaten the rebels, but he had wrecked the country; his people were now mostly destitute and hungry. The Christian population—most Christians lived in Assad-controlled territory throughout the civil war—had declined by eighty percent over those years, from about one and a half million in 2011 to around three hundred thousand.
Despite the catastrophic collapse of the Christian population in Syria during the past fourteen years, they remain in every large city. There are still Christian quarters, neighborhoods, and villages in Syria. They were even to be found under the triumphant jihadists. According to figures from 2024 cited in the pro-rebel outlet Levant24, eleven thousand one hundred and fifteen Christians—scattered between six villages and the Christian quarters of the larger towns—lived in Islamist rebel-controlled Idlib before their recent nationwide victory. They had sixteen churches. This is a relatively small number, but the fact that several thousand Christians remained under jihadist rule is something that seems to make both critics and supporters of the rebels uncomfortable.
That they lived under H.T.S. jihadist rule explodes the myth that Christian survival was unbearable and impossible under religious Sunni Muslim rule. At the same time, the rebels were indeed Islamists and did not want to be seen as too tolerant of Christians. They had moderated, according to their lights, over a decade of rule in the Idlib pocket, but they still had to be, and had to be seen as, rigorously orthodox according to Islamist doctrine. H.T.S., under its shrewd and charismatic leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (widely known until recently by his nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Joulani), was a splinter of both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. The Damascus University medical student turned Islamist revolutionary had broken with both groups and fought them in turn; both had regarded him as a renegade and a traitor.
Christian roots in Syria are very deep. In the old city of Damascus, in the Christian quarter of Bab Sharqi, you go down a long alley branching off of the Street Called Straight and arrive at the tiny chapel of Ananias, who restored the sight of Saul of Tarsus. A Syrian Orthodox church in Homs contains what is said to be part of the belt of Our Lady. The Syrian Christian mountain town of Maaloula is a stronghold of Western Neo-Aramaic, the closest living relative to the language that the Lord Jesus spoke: Galilean Aramaic. The Dead Cities area of Syria was also a major site of early Christian monasticism, including the beautiful ruins of the pilgrimage shrine of Saint Symeon the Stylite. Remnants of the pillar on which he lived for thirty-six years preaching to the faithful and corresponding with emperors and saints remain.
Even with the coming of Islam, Christianity had great influence. The Umayyad dynasty that ruled the Muslim world from Damascus had Christian poets and civil servants (one of these civil servants being the father of Saint John of Damascus, the scourge of the Iconoclasts). The mother of the second Umayyad Caliph, Yazid I, the first hereditary ruler in Islamic history, was a Christian. And the Muslim armies Yazid sent to conquer the holy cities of Medina and Mecca included Christian Arab troops who marched under the banner of Saint Sergius, a Syrian military martyr. The great Umayyad Mosque, which stands on what used to be the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Damascus, was decorated with golden mosaics by Christians. These were not slaves but, according to Ibn Jubayr, “twelve thousand craftsmen sent by the king of the Rum [Romans] at Constantinople.”
Over the centuries, many Christians either converted to Islam or emigrated, but the communities survive into our time in all their splendid riot of ecclesiastical diversity: Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Maronite, Syrian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, Assyrian Church of the East, Chaldean Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholic. In 1860, many of the Christians of Damascus were massacred in a Muslim pogrom. When the Ottomans regained control of the city, they executed hundreds of the Muslim culprits while exiling hundreds more of the city’s Arab Muslim elite. When the great genocide of Christians in Anatolia occurred during World War I, Syria was a safe haven and refuge for the survivors.
And Christians, aside from their churches, ancient history, and clergy, are still a vital part of modern Syria. There have been Syrian Christian government ministers and Syrian Christian army generals. Levantine Christian intellectuals also, it must be said, played their role in various leftist Arab nationalist revolutionary movements that were catastrophic for the region. Independent Syria even had a Christian prime minister—twice, briefly. The nationalist politician Fares al-Khoury held that position from 1944 to 1945 and from 1954 to 1955. His granddaughter Colette, an Arab feminist literary icon, is still alive. Christians were particularly well represented among Syria’s artistic, cultural, and literary community—among them the heroic actress Mai Skaf, an opponent of the Assad regime. One of Syria’s great modern painters, Elias Zayat (a personal friend), who died in 2022, was also a painter of icons and frescoes in the Orthodox Church where he prayed.
The myth has risen—in part understandably but also as a result of propaganda from Russia, Iran, and Assad himself—that the Assad regime was somehow “pro-Christian.” That is not quite true, although like many false narratives, it has a grain of truth. When I lived in Syria in the Nineties, during the rule of the elder Assad, if you’d said that the Assad regime was “pro-Christian,” people would have thought you were insane. They would have said that Assad is pro-Assad, or pro-Alawite, the secretive pseudo-Muslim heterodox sect to which the Assad clan and the regime’s security elite belonged. Everyone else was a second-class subject of the Socialist Ba’athist regime.
At that time, the regime was known for the carnage it had inflicted on the Christians of Lebanon, including assassinating two Maronite Catholic presidents, the shelling of civilians in Christian East Beirut with heavy artillery, and the imprisonment of hundreds of Lebanese Christian soldiers and anti-Syrian Christian militia fighters in 1990. Those Christian prisoners have never been seen again and are presumed to have perished in the torture chambers of the regime.
Assad (now the son rather than the father) would also play a key role in the destruction of the Christians of Iraq. After the American invasion of Iraq, the Assad regime served as the conduit for thousands of jihadist fighters to enter Iraq in order to kill Americans and Iraqis. It was not happenstance but policy. In a police state where foreigners and intruders were closely monitored, they would arrive at Damascus International Airport and then be transported directly to the border. These jihadists, both local and imported, targeted Iraqi Christians, slaughtering them in their churches, killing their priests and bishops. Today most of Iraq’s Christian population is gone, a little over twenty years after the Americans “liberated” them.
But with the coming of the Syrian Revolution in 2011, different dynamics came into play. What was initially a pluralistic, national uprising against the dictator became Islamized. This was partly organic. Islamists were well organized and disciplined in what became a bloody conflict; they were grounded in ways other fighters were not. The Sunni Muslim majority made up a large part of the Syrian opposition (although there were several prominent Christians in their ranks). The opposition was supported by Islamist regimes in Turkey and the Gulf States who preferred sober, pious men in long beards.
Part of it was intentional on the part of Assad. Influenced by the tactics of its Algerian allies, who had weathered and beaten their own Islamist insurgency, the regime actually gave amnesty to hundreds of Syrian jihadists in order to radicalize the opposition. The idea was to polarize society by extreme violence in order to present Syrians with a stark choice: “Assad or we burn the country.” The implication was that however bad the regime was, the alternative would be worse. This message was especially targeted at and received by Syria’s considerable non–Sunni Muslim minority population—Christians, Druze, Alawites, Ismailis—who were in effect told, “You have no other choice but me.” For a while it worked, except that most Christians still chose flight rather than fighting for the regime. One recalls Hilaire Belloc’s fateful words: “Syria is a fringe of life established precariously and artificially, as it were, on the edge of death’s empire.”
Christian flight from Syria did not start with the civil war. The bloody, drawn-out conflict only accelerated what had been going on for decades. Christians in the Muslim Middle East are canaries in the proverbial coal mine—a sign of the overall health, stability, and tolerance existing in Muslim-dominated societies. They are not fleeing Syria alone; they are fleeing everywhere. Christian communities were usually middle-class and business oriented; they wanted peace, prosperity, and security, commodities in short supply in a region wracked by war and revolution during the past century. They have been driven out by almost everybody at one time or another—by nationalists, socialists, secularists, and Islamists.
Secular nationalists in Tunisia and Egypt expelled long-established Christian communities of foreign origin: the Italians of Tunisia and the Greeks of Egypt. The ancient Syrian Orthodox communities of Anatolia, from the Tur Abdin region dotted to this day with astonishing churches and monasteries, were driven from their towns and villages (where they were still the majority only fifty years ago) as a result of a brutal guerrilla war between leftist Kurdish rebels and a nationalist Turkish Army. Islam had nothing to do with it. Coptic Christians are always discriminated against no matter who rules in Cairo.
H.T.S. has been extraordinarily disciplined since taking power. Its leaders have said all the right things. There have been a few cases of vandalism of churches, robberies, and a few murders of Christians (two in the turbulent Hama countryside and one in Aleppo city, to be precise). It is not clear who carried out these crimes, and similar crimes have been committed against non-Christians in the same areas. The fall of Assad led to an initial crime wave as chaos briefly replaced dictatorship. Assad regime forces, now dissolved or undercover, were often as much bandits, criminal gangs, kidnappers, and drug dealers as they were soldiers. The former rebels are stretched thin, especially in rural areas, having gone from ruling five million people in Idlib to governing over twenty million in all of Syria. And some of their Islamist allies are, like some of Assad’s forces were, no more than ill-disciplined bandits.
An early video from liberated Aleppo showed the Latin bishop of the city, Hanna Jallouf, a large cross around his neck, cordially meeting with rebel commanders. Jallouf was actually briefly kidnapped and released unharmed a decade ago by Syria’s new masters. His comments on Syria’s future since the fall of Assad have been extremely positive, noting that for the first time in thirteen years the church bells of Aleppo have sounded. The Maronite bishop of Aleppo, Joseph Toubji, in an interview on December 18, 2024, feared that there were too many weapons and too much insecurity in the country, but he lauded the promises made by H.T.S. “They are promises that inspire optimism. They treated us well, with respect, far from any sort of persecution.”
On December 11, Bashir al-Ali, the head of the Directorate of Religious Affairs of the Islamist rebels, met with Christian clergy at the Latin Monastery in Bab Touma, Damascus. In the three-hour meeting, he re-assured the Christians that the new authorities “will respect the personal status law of the Christian denominations previously in force” and that “the Christian presence will remain the same. Each community has the right to live its faith and practice its rights as it deems appropriate.” That same day, an old writer friend, a Christian Damascene who had endured the thirteen-year war and stayed while most Christians around her fled, messaged me on WhatsApp: “We are free dear Alberto.”
There is tremendous online spin on Syria both by those who trumpet the supposed “extreme threat” Syrian Christians are under and those who are playing it down. Most of the dire depictions have been proven to be factually wrong, so far. At no time in Syria’s history have its bars and illuminated Christmas trees been under such global scrutiny. It does seem ridiculous that the measure of two millennia of Christian presence in Syria should be reduced to the status of booze and Christmas decorations.
While Syria’s bars and liquor stores have so far mostly remained intact, a burnt Christmas tree led to turmoil. On December 23, foreign jihadists (probably Chechens) set fire to the public Christmas tree in the main square of al-Suqaylabiyah, a mostly Greek Orthodox town known during the war for its pro-Assad and pro-Russian militancy (the Russians built a scaled-down version of the Hagia Sophia there in 2022). The fire was quelled, the tree restored, and the arsonists arrested by H.T.S. all within a day. An official publicly apologized and promised “harsh punishment” for the perpetrators. But the incident triggered public protests by Syrian Christians in Damascus and in some smaller towns with a Christian majority. The angry Christians paraded with crosses demanding their rights and protection for their traditions. They were allowed to demonstrate without intimidation. Two days later, the jihadist fighters of H.T.S. guarded the Christian quarters of Damascus and the city’s main churches, ensuring that the first Christmas under their rule was a peaceful and secure one.
Many Christians today in Syria are happy about the end of a terrible, bankrupt, and brutal regime. They nurture a fragile optimism but are also scared about the future, fearful of the unknown. Emotions are at knife’s edge; it seems anything could set off panic. In some quarters, it already has. And yet, if the Islamist rebels can somehow bring security (which would include fully controlling their own cadres) and a better economic future for Syria, the remaining Christians will likely stay, and some who have left may even return.
The future for Christians, and for everyone else in Syria, will likely depend on how successfully the country’s now-dominant Islamists can maneuver between the shoals of order and repression, freedom and chaos. The plan, as revealed by al-Sharaa, is for the dissolution of militias, the creation of a national army, broad popular consultation in 2025, the writing of a new constitution, and democratic elections, all within a four-year interim period—a difficult, complicated, but not impossible task.
One exiled Christian who returned with much fanfare in December 2024 was the actor Maxim Khalil. An opponent of the Assad regime, in 2023 he starred in a popular Ramadan miniseries (made outside Syria) called Smile, General, in which he played an Assad-like dictator. This was a man who was on regime secret police death lists and was welcomed as a hero at the airport. The question is whether he and others will find lasting reasons to stay.
