BEIRUT: A Syrian war monitor associated with the opposition said Monday that over 120 Christian places of worship have been damaged or destroyed by all sides in the country’s eight-year conflict.
Some of the attacks were deliberate, such as the Daesh group using bulldozers to destroy the ancient Saint Elian Monastery in Homs province in 2015. The majority, however, were caused by front-line combat, shelling or rockets.
Christians made up about 10 percent of Syria’s pre-war population of 23 million, who co-existed with the Muslim majority and enjoyed freedom of worship under President Bashar Assad’s government.
Most have left for Europe over the past 20 years, with their flight significantly gathering speed since the start of the current conflict.
Around half of all Syrians are now either internally displaced or have left the country.
The report by the Qatar-based Syrian Network for Human Rights, which collects statistics on the war, said government forces were responsible for 60% of the 124 documented attacks since fighting erupted in March 2011. The rest were blamed on Daeshmilitants, the Al-Qaeda-linked group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham and other factions of the armed opposition.
There was immediate comment from the government, which rarely comments on reports from foreign organizations.
“Targeting Christian places of worship is a form of intimidation against and displacement of the Christian minority in Syria,” said Fadel Abdul Ghany, the founder and chairman of SNHR.
The report said Daesh was behind 10 attacks on Christian sites, five of which were in the northern city of Raqqa, once the extremists de-facto capital. The group was known for displacing and killing Christians in areas it controlled and confiscating their properties.
Hardest hit was the northern province of Aleppo, with 34 attacks, 24 by rebels and six by the government.
The highest number of attacks by government forces — 27 out of 29 — was in the central province of Homs.
SNHR’s report also placed blame on Syrian government allies Russia and Iran, but did not specify how many of the attacks they’d caused.
Report: Over 120 Syrian churches damaged by war since 2011
Report: Over 120 Syrian churches damaged by war since 2011
- Some of the attacks were deliberate, the majority, however, were caused by front-line combat, shelling or rockets
’Syria freed!’: thousands cheer at famed Damascus mosque
The scenes were reminiscent of the early days of the 2011 uprising
DAMASCUS: Thousands of Syrians converged on a landmark Damascus mosque for Friday prayers, waving opposition flags and chanting — a sight unimaginable just days ago before rebels ousted president Bashar Assad.
At the capital’s famed Umayyad Mosque, men, women and children gathered to celebrate on the first Friday prayers since Assad’s ouster, later streaming into the city streets and squares.
The scenes were reminiscent of the early days of the 2011 uprising, when pro-democracy protesters in Syrian cities would take to the streets after Friday prayers — but never in Damascus, long an Assad clan stronghold.
“We are gathering because we’re happy Syria has been freed, we’re happy to have been liberated from the prison in which we lived,” said Nour Thi Al-Ghina, 38.
“This is the first time we have converged in such big numbers and the first time we are seeing such an event,” she said, beaming with joy.
“We never expected this to happen.”
In 2011, Assad’s crackdown on peaceful protesters triggered a 13-year civil war that tore Syria apart, killing more than half a million people and displacing millions more.
Exhilarated crowds chanted “One, one, one, the Syrian people is one!” on Friday.
Some held the Syrian independence flag, used by the opposition since the uprising began.
Dozens of street vendors around the mosque were selling the three-star flags — which none would dare to raise in government-held areas during Assad’s iron-fisted rule.
Dozens of pictures of people who were disappeared or detained in Assad’s prisons hung on the mosque’s outer walls, the phone numbers of relatives inscribed on the images.
At the core of the system Assad inherited from his father Hafez was a brutal complex of prisons and detention centers used to eliminate dissent by jailing those suspected of stepping away from the ruling Baath party line.
War monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in 2022 that more than 100,000 people had died in the prisons since 2011.
Earlier Friday, the leader of the Islamist rebels that took power, Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani — who now uses his real name Ahmed Al-Sharaa — called on people to take to the streets to celebrate “the victory of the revolution.”
Last month, rebel forces led by his Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham group (HTS) launched a lightning offensive, seizing Damascus and ousting Assad in less than two weeks.
Omar Al-Khaled, 23, said he had rushed from HTS’s northwestern stronghold of Idlib, cut off from government areas for years, to see the capital for the first time in his life.
“It was my dream to come to Damascus,” the tailor said.
“I can’t describe my feelings. Our morale is very high and we hope that Syria will head toward a better future,” he said, adding: “People were stifled... but now the doors have opened to us.”
On Thursday, the interim government vowed to institute the “rule of law” after years of abuses under Assad.
Amani Zanhur, a 42-year-old professor of computer engineering, said many of her students had disappeared in Assad’s prisons and that she was overjoyed to be attending the prayers in the new Syria.
“There can be nothing worse than what was. We cannot fear the situation,” she told AFP, expressing support for a state based on Islamic teachings.
Thousands flocked to the nearby Umayyad Square, raising a huge rebel flag on its landmark sword monument and chanting.
“Let’s not discuss details that might separate us now and focus only on what brings us together: our hatred for Bashar Assad,” said Amina Maarawi, 42, an Islamic preacher wearing a white hijab.
Mohammed Al-Saad, 32, was overjoyed. The HTS political cadre in a smart jacket had come with colleagues from Idlib province to help set up the new government.
“We’ve been waiting 13 years for this,” he said. “We’ve come to get work started.”
Red Cross opens hotlines to try to reunite Syrian families
- Stephan Sakalian, head of delegation for ICRC in Syria, told reporters that it had opened two hotlines this week
- “We can provide them with mental health and psychosocial support”
GENEVA: The Red Cross said on Friday it had opened two new telephone hotlines to try to reunite Syrians who have been missing for years with their families, but warned that many cases will take months or years to resolve.
Since the start of Syria’s civil war over 13 years ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has received over 35,000 cases of missing people and is stepping up its efforts to help trace them.
Stephan Sakalian, head of delegation for ICRC in Syria, told reporters that it had opened two hotlines this week: one for prisoners and one for families to try to connect them.
“We can provide them with mental health and psychosocial support ... we can even help them financially if they need to be reunited,” he told a Geneva press briefing via video link from Damascus. Legal aid and health care are also available, an ICRC statement said.
The opening of president Bashar Assad’s detention system has raised hopes for reunions, with some prisoners re-emerging who were thought by their families to have been executed years ago. But Sakalian sought to temper expectations.
“Let’s make no mistake: giving answers to people will take weeks, months and maybe years, given the amount of information to process,” he said. “The work is tremendous,” he added.
The ICRC is also looking for three of its colleagues who were abducted in 2013. “Like everyone we want to have hope and seek any signal or any news that may bring some closure to their families, but for the moment, we do not have any news,” he added.
UN: New Syria authorities sending ‘constructive’ signals
- Since Bashar Assad’s ouster, the UNHCR had had ‘some contact with the interim authorities’
GENEVA: Syria’s new interim authorities have asked the United Nations refugee agency to remain in the country following the ouster of president Bashar Assad, sending a “constructive” signal, the organization said Friday.
Assad fled Syria on Sunday after a lightning offensive spearheaded by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) group and its allies, which ended five decades of repressive rule by Assad’s family.
The rule was marked by the mass jailing and killing of suspected dissidents, and nearly 14 years of civil war that left more than 500,000 people dead and millions displaced.
“The needs are absolutely huge,” Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, UNHCR’s representative in Syria, told reporters in Geneva by video link from Damascus.
Since Assad’s ouster, the agency had had “some contact with the interim authorities,” he said, adding: “the initial signals that they are sending us are constructive.”
The authorities were saying “they want us to stay in Syria, that they appreciate the work that we have been doing now for many years, that they need us to continue doing that work,” Vargas Llosa said.
Most importantly, he said the interim authorities had indicated “they will provide us the necessary security to carry out those activities.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross meanwhile highlighted the towering task ahead to help Syrian families whose loved ones disappeared under the Assad rule.
In recent years, “we have been approached by tens of thousands of families who have come to us with what we call a tracing request,” said Stephan Sakalian, who heads the organization’s Syria delegation.
The ICRC has documented over 35,000 cases of disappearances, he told reporters from Damascus, adding the true number was likely far higher.
The organization is calling for the protection and preservation of archives found in detention facilities and elsewhere, as well as of burial sites.
“What we need now is of course a more structured and an urgent discussion with the interim government,” Sakalian said.
He said ICRC wanted to help determine “the best way to coordinate these efforts to preserve not only the documents but also the mass graves” and other information that could help “families in the future to identify the whereabouts and the fate of their beloved ones.”
Syria’s new rulers call for victory celebrations in streets
- Militant leader Abu Mohammed Al-Golani is now using his real name Ahmed Al-Sharaa
- His call comes ahead of the first Friday prayers since Syria’s new leadership took control
DAMASCUS: Syria’s militant chief called on people across the country to celebrate “the victory of the revolution” on Friday, as G7 leaders looked to forge a common approach to the new government.
More than half a century of brutal rule by the Assad clan came to a sudden end on Sunday, after a lightning militant offensive led by Abu Mohammed Al-Golani’s Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) swept across the country and took the capital.
Ousted president Bashar Assad fled Syria, closing an era in which suspected dissidents were jailed or killed, and capping nearly 14 years of war that killed more than 500,000 people and displaced millions.
“I would like to congratulate the great Syrian people on the victory of the blessed revolution and I call on them to go to the streets to express their joy,” Golani said on Telegram.
Golani, who is now using his real name Ahmed Al-Sharaa, is set to attend Friday prayers at Damascus’s landmark Umayyad Mosque.
During the early days of Syria’s uprising in 2011, protesters would often gather after noon prayers on Fridays, the Muslim day of prayer and rest.
Assad’s overthrow has allowed Syrians to flood to prisons, hospitals and morgues in search of long-disappeared loved ones, hoping for a miracle, or at least closure.
“I turned the world upside down looking,” Abu Mohammed said as he searched for news of three missing relatives at the Mazzeh air base in Damascus.
“But I didn’t find anything at all. We just want a hint of where they were, one percent.”
Sunni Muslim HTS is rooted in Syria’s branch of Al-Qaeda and designated a terrorist organization by many Western governments, who now face the challenge of how to approach the country’s new transitional leadership.
The group has sought to moderate its rhetoric, and the interim government insists the rights of all Syrians will be protected.
The spokesman for the newly installed government, Obaida Arnaout, said that the country’s constitution and parliament would be suspended during a three-month transition.
“A judicial and human rights committee will be established to examine the constitution and then introduce amendments,” he said, pledging that the “rule of law” would be instituted.
Leaders of the Group of Seven countries, who will meet virtually at 1430 GMT on Friday, said they were ready to support the transition to an “inclusive and non-sectarian” government in Syria.
They called for the protection of human rights, including those of women and minorities, while emphasizing “the importance of holding the Assad regime accountable for its crimes.”
Inside much of Syria, the focus for now is on unraveling the secrets of Assad’s rule, and particularly the network of detention centers and suspected torture sites scattered across areas previously under government control.
Syria’s leadership said it is willing to cooperate with Washington in the search for US citizens who disappeared under Assad’s rule, including US journalist Austin Tice, who was abducted in 2012.
Another American, Travis Timmerman, has already been located alive and Blinken said Washington was working to bring him home.
The search for other missing detainees has ended more painfully, with hundreds of Syrians gathering Thursday to bury outspoken activist Mazen Al-Hamada.
In exile in the Netherlands, he publicly testified on the torture he was subjected to in Syrian prison.
He later returned to Syria and was detained. His body was among more than 30 found in a Damascus hospital morgue this week.
Assad was propped up by Russia — where a senior Russian official told US media he has fled — as well as Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group.
The militants launched their offensive on November 27, the same day a ceasefire took effect in the Israel-Hezbollah war, which saw Israel inflict staggering losses on Assad’s Lebanese ally.
Both Israel and Turkiye, which backs some of the militants who ousted Assad, have since carried out strikes inside Syria.
The fall of Assad has prompted some of the millions of Syrians who fled abroad to return home.
On Friday morning, around 60 people were waiting at Turkiye’s Oncupinar border crossing, anxious to reach Syria.
In the southern city of Sweida, the heartland of Syria’s Druze minority where anti-government demonstrations have been held for more than a year, hundreds took to the streets on Friday, singing and clapping in jubiliation.
“Our joy is indescribable,” said Haitham Hudeifa, 54. “Every province is celebrating this great victory.”
Freed Syrian prisoners return to their ‘death dormitory’
- “Every day in this room, which used to be called ‘Steel 1 — the death dormitory,’ one to three people would die inside every day,” Hanania, 35, told Reuters
DAMASCUS:Basim Faiz Mawat stood in the Damascus cell that his fellow prisoners used to call the “death dormitory,” struggling to believe that the system that abused him for so long had been overthrown and his suffering had ended.
“I came here today only to see that truly nothing lasts forever,” the 48-year-old said as he and another freed prisoner, Mohammed Hanania, visited the detention center where their guards never showed mercy.
They were among thousands who spilled out of Syria’s prison system on Sunday after a lightning militia advance overthrew President Bashar Assad and ended five decades of his family’s rule. Many detainees were met by tearful relatives who thought they had been executed years earlier.
“Every day in this room, which used to be called ‘Steel 1 — the death dormitory,’ one to three people would die inside every day,” Hanania, 35, told Reuters.
“The sergeant was — when he didn’t lose someone, when someone didn’t die from weakness, he would kill him. He took them to the toilets and hit them with the heel of his shoe on their heads.”
Hanania walked on past long rows of empty cells. Names of prisoners — Mohammed Al-Masry, Ahmed and others — were scratched on walls with dates.
The floors were littered with rubble and discarded clothes. A row of blankets was still set out in one cell where prisoners had slept.
Both men looked up at an image on a wall of Assad, who is accused of torturing and killing thousands, abuses that were also rampant during his father Hafez’s reign of terror.
“No one could have believed this would happen,” said Mawat.
MASS EXECUTIONS
In another room, he stood beside a rusty blue ladder and described how he was blindfolded and forced to climb up the steps. Then his torturer would kick away the ladder and he would be suspended by his arms from the ceiling in agony.
“My shoulders were torn, and I couldn’t say a single word. No one could bear more than five or 10 minutes,” he said.
Rights groups have reported mass executions in Syria’s prisons. In 2017, the United States said it had identified a new crematorium at the Sednaya military prison on the outskirts of Damascus to dispose of hanged prisoners.
Syrians have flocked to the prisons looking for their loved ones. Some have been released alive, others have been identified among the dead and thousands more have not yet been found.
Syrian militia leader Ahmad Al-Sharaa — better known as Abu Mohammed Al-Golani — the main commander of the militants who toppled Assad, has said he will close the prisons and hunt down anyone involved in the torture or killing of detainees.
Assad fled to his ally Russia where he was granted asylum.
“At this stage, if everyone thinks about taking revenge, we have no solution other than to forgive,” Hanania said.
“But the criminal who has blood (on their hands) should be held accountable. I will leave my rights to be granted by God.”
