Don't be fooled: Assad is no friend of Syria's Christian minorities

The Hill ^ | 2017 | Syrian Christian contributors

[GoldenState_Rose]

During a markup of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher asserted that the Assad regime was “the protector of the Christians” in Syria.

As Syrian Christians who grew up in Syria, we would beg to differ.

Hundreds of innocent Christians seeking freedom have been tortured to death in Assad’s jails or shot to death by his brutal thugs – including the activist Bassel Shehadeh, who was killed at a protest, then killed in spirit because Assad forces prevented his friends from going to church to pray for his soul. Human rights lawyer Khalil Maatouk has been detained in Assad’s jails in Damascus for over four years for the “crime” of defending detainees in Assad’s jails.

These anecdotes are not new and are not isolated incidents. Christians never had true freedom of religion under the Assad regime; for decades, it used a mixture of incentives and threats to tightly control Christian clergy and ensure that they were not free to speak their mind. Christians were much more free before Assad took power, when Protestant Christian Fares al-Khouri was elected prime minister of Syria in democratic elections in 1954. But under Assad, Rohrbacher might be surprised to know, Christians are legally banned from becoming the head of state.

It’s a strange protector of Christians who nurtures and shelters their worst enemies against the will of the entire world. Assad did that, too — starting in 2003, his intelligence services worked closely with the terrorist fanatics who would eventually form ISIS because he wanted to prevent America from stabilizing Iraq.

[Chaguito]

This article is certainly at odds with the testimony of my Syrian high school students, who uniformly agreed that Assad was the only thing between their families and annihilation at the hands of muslims.