The country’s new leader, Ahmed al-Shara, has donned a suit, trimmed his beard, and dropped his nom de guerre. But Syrians are still afraid.
The messages started appearing on my phone as soon as I left Syria in mid-January. At first, there were links to articles, and social media posts, about threats to Alawis and Christians. Then came friends’ accounts of scary incidents. One woman wrote that a police officer from the new government ordered her to cover her hair. Another told me a Sunni friend – a friend – threatened to kill her. A Christian businessman I’ve known for years texted that he would no longer send me anything political via WhatsApp, because the new government was watching.
The atmosphere was already changing from what I had observed at the beginning of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) government under its leader, Ahmed al-Shara. Shara had dropped his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, along with the battle fatigues from his years leading Sunni Muslim fundamentalists against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. With a trimmed beard and a new suit, he was receiving and visiting fellow heads of state from the Middle East and beyond. An American delegation was so impressed that the US revoked its $10 million bounty on Shara’s head for terrorist crimes.
I saw Christians celebrating Christmas as always with Masses, concerts, parties, and processions through the old city. HTS’s new governor of Damascus, Maher Marwan, promenaded through the Christian Quarter on Christmas Eve with reassurances that no one would interfere with their religious practices. Restaurants served alcohol, and HTS has so far not ordered women to hide their hair. Yet even then, some of my Syrian friends—and I am fortunate to have many from more than 50 years of visiting their country—said they were afraid, less of the present than of the past and the future…
Read the full article in The Nation.
Main image: Ahmad al-Shara, President of the Syrian transitional government, and Hadja Lahbib, European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management. © European Union, 2025, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
