On Saturday morning, like everyone else, I was shocked by the news coming from my hometown. In a few hours, Aleppo, the second-largest city in Syria, fell under the control of an alliance of rebel groups coming from the small enclaves they still held in the northwestern part of the country. This new development came as an unexpected turn of events after years of the status quo, or the freezing of the conflict as it was termed by Russia, Turkey and Iran, the brokers of the Astana peace talks.
No one expected that the opposition armed groups still had it in them to plan such a broad and rapid attack. No one foresaw this swift collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s defensive forces around the city. It had cost the Assad regime months of extensive military campaigns, supported by the relentless aerial bombardment of the Russian army and ground offensives involving thousands of fighters from Lebanese and Iraqi militias, to chase the opposition forces from Aleppo’s eastern half in 2016. How could it fall this fast?
I was in awe — I find it difficult to put into words the plethora of feelings I am experiencing. On the one hand, my dear city, which I have been forbidden from visiting since July 2011, has been liberated from the regime that detained and tortured both my brother and sister, forcing them to eventually leave the country for good. But on the other hand, can I really call this an act of liberation, knowing that leading the attack was a force designated as a terrorist group?
For many fellow Syrians, the city was liberated from the worst despotic regime they could imagine. Hundreds of thousands of the city’s inhabitants who were exiled from their neighborhoods in the eastern parts of the city eight years ago can finally return home. It feels like liberation for hundreds of political prisoners whose videos of escaping the dozens of detention centers were flooding the internet within a few hours. The tears of joy on their faces and the cries of disbelief from their family members speak eloquently of the suffering of hundreds of thousands of disappeared Syrians.
However, beneath all this lingers a dark reality. The alliance of rebel groups that entered the city is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the latest rebrand of what was known as Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al Qaeda. This fact made me full of doubt about the kind of future that awaits my city.
As a member of the small Christian community of Aleppo, I know firsthand how terrified the Christian community in the city must be of these latest developments. This same fear turned me into a pariah within my community back in 2011, when I dared to publicly express my support for the uprising against the Assad regime, and the need for a transition toward democracy. It is no secret that the majority of Christians in Syria, and especially in Aleppo, were not in favor of the uprising in 2011. They argued that it would not bring about a democratic Syria, but only replace the existing government with a more radical Islamic regime that would threaten their way of life and potentially chase them out of their homes. Have they been right all along? Or could one argue that the fear that paralyzed them and prevented their involvement in what was happening became a self-fulfilling prophecy?
For decades before the Syrian uprising, the Assad regime presented itself as the protector of minorities, benefiting from the awful consequences of many events in the Middle East’s recent history, including the civil war in Lebanon that Christians appeared to lose as their leaders were either imprisoned or sent into exile, sectarian clashes with the Christian Coptic minority in Egypt and the occupation of Iraq in 2003, which gave rise to a brutal branch of al Qaeda and unleashed another ugly sectarian conflict.
When I was still living in Aleppo, I met several Christian Iraqi families who had to flee overnight after receiving ransom notes from jihadist groups threatening to kidnap their daughters if they didn’t pay. These examples and stories had an impact on the Christians’ collective consciousness in Syria and without a doubt affected their stance toward the uprising.
It is not that the Christians in Syria were naive about the intentions of the regime. Our elders lamented for years the poor treatment they received from the Baath government, which removed the management of Christian private schools in Syria from the community and didn’t restore it until a few months after the start of the uprising to win back Christians to its side. The Assad regime itself did not even bother to claim a higher moral ground. Everyone knew how deep the corruption ran within the state, how the economy was run through certain clientelist networks that had close ties with the head of the regime. The Assad regime was just telling everyone directly and indirectly, through the small sectarian incidents it was sponsoring here and there, “I am the lesser evil and only a minority alliance will guarantee your protection.”
During the 14 years of the uprising and the civil war that it became, there were all sorts of violations of human rights by extremists among the opposition forces or the jihadist groups. Many of them were filmed and broadcast. How can anyone forget the horrible execution films of the Islamic State group? There was no shortage of such material in Syria, and each film was widely circulated by the regime propaganda machine to make the same point over and over again: “If I collapse moderates and minorities will suffer, and you have no other choice but to stick with me no matter how horrible I am, and even if I lead you to your doom.”
Not that the Assad regime itself did not commit any violations. YouTube is full of them. International and Syrian human rights organizations have documented thousands of those state-sponsored violations in the detention centers. One can easily Google the multitude of reports on the systematic torture and killings that took place in prisons like Tadmor and Saidnaya, or the massacre of Tadamon, in which the regime summarily executed nearly 300 civilians and buried many of them in a mass grave.
Yet somehow, most of these violations did not have an impact on the Christian community’s consciousness, nor did they affect the Assad regime’s status as its protector from the jihadists. Maybe because the Syrian minorities willingly fell into the propaganda trap that all of those who were being tortured and killed were just terrorists who wanted to enforce Islamic Sharia once they took power. Maybe the minorities wanted to convince themselves that they could never fall victim to this horrible torture machine themselves if they kept up their end of the bargain, which was not to intervene in public life or demand accountability. Even when some Christians were detained and tortured, the minorities managed to find endless excuses. I still remember with deep sadness the way that many of my family members and childhood friends reacted to my sister’s arrest and torture. “She must have done something wrong; they wouldn’t do this to her for nothing.” Such comments came from people who were close to my sister and knew very well that she was not involved whatsoever in political activity. I was sick of these justifications and knew that sooner or later we Christians would pay a heavy price for this detachment from what was happening. That the Christian presence in Aleppo has decreased from 220,000 in 2011 to perhaps 20,000 today bears out that fear.
As regards current events, how can one deal with one’s worst fears and nightmares when they materialize? What the minorities in Aleppo have long feared has just happened at lightning speed. No one even had the chance to pack and leave this time. The regime has abandoned them to the opposition forces without any warning, and to rub salt into the wound, it is even retaliating with aerial bombardment of the city it failed to defend.
Today, after 13 years, I cannot blame the Christians of Aleppo if they are terrified. Throughout the years of the conflict the main opposition bodies, except in the northeastern parts of Syria, did not produce a single viable or reliable example of governance. The northwest was not exactly the best advertisement for life under the opposition’s armed groups. The political branch of the opposition had no control whatsoever over the armed groups or their warlords. They could not prevent the looting of properties and the violations committed against the Kurds in Afrin nor the persecution of the Druze in Idlib. These armed groups were repeatedly involved in conflicts among themselves over spoils, which resulted in the deaths of many innocent bystanders. One can only imagine the terror among my fellow Aleppines of anticipating such clashes in their streets and neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, the coverage of the main opposition media outlet, Syria TV, which is broadcasting from Istanbul about the tolerance of the opposition fighters toward Christians and how they were able to worship undisturbed on Sunday, is not helping at all. I have also seen some reporters interviewing Christian citizens in the streets. It was obvious that the interviewees were terrified, unable to say no to the interview requests. They must have been trying to balance every word in order not to upset the new rulers while avoiding regime retaliation in case it returns to the city. These poor citizens were praising the new rulers for letting them run their errands and repeating meaningless empty words about the brotherhood between Christians and Muslims: the same old kind of nonsense we used to hear on official Syrian TV for four decades before it all exploded in our faces.
Some guests on the same channel have been insisting for days that no one is going to enforce an Islamic dress code on Christian women or close churches, as if this is enough and the Christians’ main fears and way of life are restricted to these two points. With this kind of naive coverage and discourse, all the opposition media is doing is reinforcing the fear of the future. Christians’ main concerns are not about being able to go to church every Sunday, despite its symbolic meaning, nor about being forced to wear a hijab or burqa. They are about a possible return to the Ottoman millet system, whereby Christians would be regarded not as having full rights and responsibilities but rather as second-class citizens — in the best-case scenario being seen as special guests without any say regarding public life in the country and the land they inhabited long before Islam reached it, and potentially being treated like an endangered species that needs special care.
In my opinion, the only way to reassure Christians in these circumstances is for Aleppo to be run by a civilian administration of the city’s notables after all armed groups retreat from the city, and for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its so-called “salvation government” to understand that the city’s Muslims, Christians and Kurds have lived together for centuries and know how to manage their daily life without any custodian.
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