Assadist Secularism

Better call it a "A Sadist's secularism". An overview of Assad's "secular" credentials.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft2YEQK8oWc
April 8, 2005: Christopher Hitchens addressing "Assad being secular"


Sectarian massacres


http://sn4hr.org/wp-content/pdf/english/The_Societys_Holocaust.pdf
A report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights found that of the 56 sectarian or ethnic massacres between 2011 and 2015, 49 were perpetrated by the government.


http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/assad-regime-jihadis-collaborators-allies/
sectarianism exists on the regime side, as evinced by sectarian massacres perpetrated by forces fighting for the regime, whether by Alawite irregular militiamen (the Houla massacre) or foreign Shi’a militiamen (the Nabk massacre in rural Damascus province as part of the regime’s offensive to push through Qalamoun; like the Ma’an massacre, numerous members of a single family- the Masto family– were wiped out). The point is that Assad is a beneficiary not only of ISIS’ presence but also of multiple other rebel groups, but it does not follow that these groups must be secretly working with the regime.


Sectarian cleansing/demography strategy


http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/irans-useful-syria-is-practically-complete
While Assad's demography strategy is aimed at helping the regime maintain control over Damascus, Iran and its proxy militias are also very invested in the process. Tehran hopes that the deals with besieged Sunni towns will further its own "useful Syria" strategy, which entails wresting control over a corridor linking Syria's coastal region with Hezbollah's strongholds in Lebanon. As Iran's main Shiite proxy force, Hezbollah has already conducted ethnic cleansing of its own in certain areas along the border (e.g., its 2013 campaigns in al-Qusayr and the Qalamoun region). Also, hundreds of thousands of Sunnis were evacuated from Homs between 2011 and 2014, when a deal was finally struck with regime forces after starvation reached horrifying levels.
As a result of these efforts, the corridor linking Qalamoun to Damascus, Homs, and the Alawite enclave may soon be Sunni-free. In addition to shielding the capital from the mainly Sunni anti-Assad forces, this development would give Hezbollah safe access to the Golan Heights, potentially allowing the group to open another front against Israel. Iran could also use its reinforced grip over Syria and Lebanon to project more power against Israel, whether by supporting Hezbollah in the Golan or increasing its assistance to Palestinian groups like Hamas. Indeed, this corridor should be viewed in a regional context -- it would link Iran, Iraq, and the almost-complete "useful Syria" to the Beqa Valley and southern Hezbollah military stronghold in Lebanon, and Tehran's Shiite-controlled crescent would be whole. (Although there would be no territorial link between this part of Syria and Iraq, preserving Iranian-backed governments in Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut would allow Tehran to create a political contiguity sufficient to fulfill its goals.)




http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/damascus-control-emboldens-assad-nationally 
Bashar's father believed that whoever held Damascus held Syria. Part of the elder Assad's effort to control Damascus after seizing power in a coup in November 1970 was to station tens of thousands of troops, along with Alawite officials and their families, in the city. Whereas in 1947 only 300 Alawites lived in Damascus (out of about 500,000 metropolitan-area inhabitants), that figure had soared by 2010 to more than 500,000 (of about 5 million in the metro area), or a quarter of Syria's Alawite community. More Alawites thus lived in Damascus than in any other Syrian city.
....
Beginning in the 1970s, the regime also sought to distribute Alawites strategically throughout the city. In this arrangement, regime officials still live in Malki, around Assad's private residence, while lower-ranking civil servants inhabit Mezzeh 86, a large area overlooking the wealthy neighborhoods of Mezzeh. Also attracting Alawites are the originally Druze-Christian suburban towns (e.g., Jdeidat Artouz, Jaramana, and Sahnaya), which offer a more sustainable lifestyle than the conservative Sunni areas of Ghouta (e.g., Douma, Daraya, Zamalka) -- which have become strongholds of the rebellion. 
 Since Hafiz al-Assad's rise, the Syrian regime likewise allowed Alawite, Druze, and Christian neighborhoods to expand close to the strategic axes linking Damascus to the rest of the country and Lebanon, while also interrupting the city's "Sunni crescent." This is the case in the large suburb of Jaramana, which beginning in the 1980s was developed along the road to Damascus International Airport, fitting the regime's strategic plan to separate the city's Sunni suburbs -- West and East Ghouta. 

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/syria-leader-assad-seeks-russian-protection-from-ally-iran-a-1056263.html

Oct 2015: Just as in Damascus, Latakia and Jabla, increasing numbers of hosseiniehs -- Shiite religious teaching centers -- are opening. The centers are aimed at converting Sunnis, and even the Alawites, the denomination to which the Assads belong, to "correct" Shiite Islam by way of sermons and stipends. In addition, the government decreed one year ago that state-run religion schools were to teach Shiite material.

All of this is taking place to the consternation of the Alawites, who have begun to voice their displeasure. "They are throwing us back a thousand years. We don't even wear headscarves and we aren't Shiites," Alawites complained on the Jableh News Facebook page. There were also grumblings when a Shiite mosque opened in Latakia and an imam there announced: "We don't need you. We need your children and grandchildren."

In addition, Iranian emissaries, either directly or via middlemen, have been buying land and buildings in Damascus, including almost the entire former Jewish quarter, and trying to settle Shiites from other countries there.

Talib Ibrahim, a Syrian journalist from the Alawite community who fled to the Netherlands many years ago, summarizes the mood as follows: "Assad wants the Iranians as fighters, but increasingly they are interfering ideologically with domestic affairs. The Russians don't do that."

....

Confessional Cleansing

It is, however, questionable whether Iranian influence in the country can be reversed. Negotiations in the Syrian city of Zabadani serve to demonstrate just how far the "Iranian project" has advanced. The city northwest of Damascus, which has been surrounded for three years now, is strategically important for the Shiite militia Hezbollah. Held by rebels, Zabadani represents the last significant hurdle standing in the way of Hezbollah's plan to bring the entire Syrian border region surrounding Lebanon under its control. At the beginning of July, Hezbollah began a large-scale offensive against Zabadani. In response, rebels in Idlib laid siege to, and began firing on, the villages Fua and Kafraya, where more than 10,000 members of the Shiite minority live. Tehran then stepped in and began negotiating directly with the Syrian rebels, including the Nusra Front. The leadership in Damascus was not involved in the talks.

A deal was reached that went much further than anything that Assad has ever agreed to with the rebels. But it is explosive. It demonstrates that the Iranians no longer believe in an Assad victory, and it shows that the country's partitioning has begun, including confessional cleansing.

The cease-fire calls for all Sunnis currently living in Zabadani to leave the city in the direction of Idlib. In return, the Shiites in Fua and Kafraya will be allowed to resettle to the south. The cease-fire would be valid in a whole series of towns and villages in the area and the deal calls for the region's airspace to be made off-limits to the Syrian regime's jets and helicopters as a kind of local no-fly zone.

It is a deep encroachment on the regime's autonomy and Assad is doing all he can to resist the implementation of the deal, which also involves the release of 500 prisoners.

The tumult Iran's meddling has unleashed within Assad's circle has hardly reached the outside world. But some of the regime's most powerful figures -- those who have opposed Iran's power plays -- have disappeared recently, some of them amid rather odd circumstances.

Exploding Villas

Last December, General Rustum Ghazaleh, head of the Syrian Political Security Directorate, had his own estate just south of Damascus blown up and also had the event filmed. The video, backed by melodramatic music and pledges of allegiance to Assad, was then posted online. Not long later, Ghazaleh was beat to death by henchmen from the Syrian secret service, two Iranians among them. The reason: Ghazaleh's resistance to the Shiite militias, with whom he had refused any kind of cooperation. The Iranian's had allegedly wanted to use his villa as its headquarters, which is why Ghazaleh had it destroyed.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QOsWhPfQbL0J:syriadirect.org/news/in-a-small-but-strategic-village-residents-are-ordered-to-leave/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=firefox-b
http://syriadirect.org/news/in-a-small-but-strategic-village-residents-are-ordered-to-leave/

August 10, 2016: For the second time in less than a month, regime and Hezbollah forces have expelled hundreds of families from a village in the Qalamoun mountains.

The village of Hurayra links rebel-held territory in the Wadi Barada region with the rebel-held and regime-encircled towns of Madaya and Zabadani—the starting point of Hezbollah-managed smuggling routes to neighboring Lebanon.

On Saturday, government-allied soldiers with loudspeakers informed the residents of Hurayra, roughly 30km northwest of Damascus, that they had 24 hours to evacuate their homes.

At 12:00pm Sunday, the pro-regime fighters entered the village and “expelled between 200 and 220 families,” an activist who fled Hurayra and is now in an undisclosed location in the suburbs of Damascus tells Syria Direct’s Waleed a-Noufal.

The expelled residents were allowed to go to either regime or opposition territory and to “carry small handbags with their belongings,” said the activist.

On July 17, the soldiers surrounding Hurayra issued a similar 24-hour deadline and 400 families left, Syria Direct reported. Following the first expulsion of Hurayra’s residents, fighters with Jabhat al-Nusra retaliated by executing 12 regime captives in a video circulated on social media.

The families who remained after the July incident were “related to draft dodgers or opposition fighters,” the activist told Syria Direct on July 20. Of the village’s 800 original families, only those with government affiliations have been allowed to remain.

http://www.irinnews.org/analysis/2016/09/20/syrian-evacuations-break-will-resist
21 Sep 2016:

On Monday, a planned evacuation of several hundred rebels from the besieged, bombed-out Homs neighbourhood of Waer was postponed. Rebel groups including Ahrar al-Sham and other factions had threatened to end the already shaky ceasefire over reports that evacuations would begin there, arguing that “starve or surrender” siege tactics and "sectarian cleansing” by government forces had effectively voided the ceasefire. An activist in Waer said locals would not leave without the presence of the United Nations to guarantee safe passage to their planned destination, Idlib.

By the UN’s count there are approximately 590,000 Syrians living under siege. Other counts put the number above one million. The majority are besieged by government forces and their allies. A handful of pockets around Syria, including the northern Shia villages Fua and Kefraya, are besieged by mostly Islamist rebel groups.

....

Syrian government officials deny demographic or sectarian motivations in forced evacuations. Presidential spokeswoman Bouthaina Shaaban has referred to them as “local reconciliations”.

Pierret is more in line with Balanche and sees incidents like Daraya in more sectarian terms. Regardless of social factors, they represent a “strategy that targets certain communities based on their sectarian affiliation”, he argues.

“It’s sectarian cleansing in the sense of re-engineering. It’s basically the Syrian regime deciding that certain communities should live in certain places because they are now more easily controllable when they live there… a strategy of concentration.”


https://www.memri.org/reports/together-its-allies-syrian-regime-forcing-demographic-change-areas-country-self-protection

These moves appear to be aimed at creating a homogenously pro-regime area with a Shi'ite and Alawite majority in a geographic region many refer to by the post-World War I term La Syrie Utile ("Useful Syria"). This is aimed at helping ensure the survival of the Syrian regime and of its strategic depth with Hizbullah in Lebanon and with Iran, in the event that Syria ends up being divided in any way as a solution to the crisis.

President Assad outlined this policy in a July 26, 2015 speech, saying: "The homeland does not belong to those who live there, nor to those who hold a passport or are citizens. The homeland belongs to those who protect and guard it." Assad explained that circumstances on the ground require the Syrian army to withdraw from various areas "so that it can protect other, more important regions" and that the regime army "cannot fight on all fronts out of fear of losing control in certain areas, [and therefore] we relinquish [certain] regions in favor of important areas under our control." These statements have been interpreted by Syrian opposition elements as proof that such a La Syrie Utile project is indeed underway.

....

For the past few years, Arab media, and particularly Syrian and Lebanese media hostile to the resistance axis, have been reporting on what is happening to the mostly Sunni anti-regime population in Damascus and its environs; in Homs, on the Damascus-Tartus road; in the towns of Al-Qusayr and Baniyas, between Homs and the northern Lebanese Beqaa Valley; in Al-Zabadani, north of the Damascus-Beirut highway; and recently also in the town of Madaya (on the Damascus-Beirut highway) and in Darayya (south of Damascus). The latter two locales have been in the news because of the regime's systematic starvation and expulsion of their residents.[9] These reports reveal a wide range of violent methods used by the Syrian regime, Iran, and Hizbullah to shift the mostly Sunni population that they do not want there, including besieging towns and starving their residents;[10] transferring residents as part of ceasefire agreements; demolishing homes and burning farmland; setting up roadblocks to monitor and intimidate the population; forcing residents to sell their property; burning land registration offices in order to destroy records; and killing residents and intimidating the survivors. In addition to these methods are Shi'ization (on which see below) and, following the removal of Sunni and anti-regime residents, settling Shi'ite, 'Alawite, and other pro-regime families in these areas.

http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/quwat-dir-al-qalamoun-shifting-militia-links/
It does not follow from all of the above that there is no truth to aspects of the demographic change narrative. Increasing purchases of property in Syria by Iran is very real, along with some Shi’i proselytization efforts. The removal of some rebels and civilians to Idlib, the main rebel-bastion in western Syria now, is very real as well (as documented above). Considerable ethnic cleansing in fighting has also occurred in places like Homs city. However, the regime and Iran cannot wish away the reality of a large Sunni majority in Syria. Multiple approaches are therefore adopted towards dealing with territories retaken from the rebels, one of which includes amnesties and recruitment to pro-regime militias, undoubtedly contributing in the grand scheme to the regime’s long-term plan to reconquer the entirety of Syria.


http://spon.de/aeVo4
22 Feb 2017:

Religious tensions are stronger than ever today. Not everyone is allowed to return to the destroyed city, with the government making it difficult for Sunnis, most of whom supported the uprising against Assad, to return to their own homes. The regime officials, as well as the pro-government militias that control individual neighborhoods, want to keep them out.

Those who wish to return are subject to vetting. The fact that a relative sympathized with the rebels is often enough to bar someone from returning. "Many are afraid to file the application in the first place, fearing persecution," says a man who wished to remain anonymous, hinting at the possibility of religious purges and resettlement.

In the plans to rebuild Homs, there is no room for those who once took to the streets to demand their rights. Sunnis see this as yet another form of punishment by the Assad regime.

For Talal al-Barazi, the governor of Homs, none of this is a problem. A man with a soft smile, he is a staunch supporter of Assad and he meets with us in his wood-paneled office. "People turn in their weapons and are vetted, and those who have not committed punishable offenses are allowed to return," he says.

But what exactly does "not committed punishable offenses" mean? The fighters and supporters of the opposition fear prison, torture and death. In the best case, they can expect to be drafted into Assad's army against their will.

Syrian textbooks

http://www.impact-se.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Syria2001.pdf 
Glorification of jihad and martyrdom in Syrian textbooks


http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/L/Joshua.M.Landis-1/Islamic%20Education%20in%20Syria.htm 
Islamic education in Syrian schools is traditional, rigid, and Sunni. The Ministry of Education makes no attempt to inculcate notions of tolerance or respect for religious traditions other than Sunni Islam. Christianity is the one exception to this rule. Indeed, all religious groups other than Christians are seen to be enemies of Islam, who must be converted or fought against. The Syrian government teaches school children that over half of the world's six billion inhabitants will go to hell and must be actively fought by Muslims. Jews have their own status. The Jewish religion  the Torah and the Jewish prophets are considered divine  but the Jewish people, who, it is claimed, deny their prophets, are fated to go to hell and must be eliminated.


http://daringopinion.com/Syria%27s-Islamic-Textbooks-5-2011.php 
Syria’s religious curriculum makes all Muslim students regardless of sect read Sunni Islam. Not a word or a single reference is made in the textbooks to the beliefs and interpretations of the Islamic creed according to the doctrines of Syria’s Alawite, Ismaili, or Druze minorities. In so doing, the Asads have sacrificed the Alawite identity (as well those of Ismailis and Druzes), outwardly at least, in order to appease the Sunni majority. Joshua Landis put it aptly: “The Asads have struggled to be good Sunnis, not to make Sunnis into good liberals.”[14]

That a unified Islamic curriculum under the Sunni banner eliminates sectarianism in Syria is wishful thinking. Non-Sunni Muslim families are thought to be resentful of the Sunni classes. As minorities, while they support the Alawite regime politically they protect their cultural identity by teaching the children at home the tenets of the specific sect to which they belong.

Syria’s Islamic school education is discriminatory, divisive and intolerant of non-Muslims. Nowhere in the textbooks is there even a hint to be kind or helpful to non-Muslims. The textbooks order kindness and support to Muslims alone (fifth grade; p. 43, seventh grade; p. 45, eighth grade, p. 79). From the third grade to twelfth grade, the textbooks are loaded with antagonistic, prejudiced, and violent references against polytheists, atheist, and other non-Muslim enemies (third grade; p. 96, sixth grade; p. 7, eighth grade; p. 79, tenth grade; p. 77), the eighty percent of the world population who are disallowed from entering Mecca and Medina.

Although, the Jewish people are regarded in Islam as “people of the book”, the textbooks reserve their sharpest criticism for Jews (eleventh grade; pp. 33, 63 and 65, twelfth grade; p. 61). On the other hand, references to Christians, also “people of the book” are conspicuously absent; though, orthodox Sunnis regard Christians as polytheists by virtue of the church’s belief in the Holy Trinity—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  

Syrian laws

http://daringopinion.com/Why-Syria%27s-Christians-Should-not-Support-the-Asad-Regime-5-2011.php 

Article 3.1 of the Syria constitution makes Islam the necessary religion of the president. Christians are barred from the country’s highest political office. Article 3.2 makes Islam as “a main source” of legislation.

Seventh century Shari’a laws and courts are in force in personal status, family, and inheritance affairs (Christians follow their own archaic religious courts). Shari’a law is the antithesis of the liberal laws of the modern age. It denies women legal rights compared with Muslim men. It impinges on women’s human rights. Shari’a law reduces the status of women to that of chattel—a Muslim man can marry four wives, divorce any one of them without giving reason (with limited child custody rights, housing, or alimony), a Muslim woman is prohibited from marrying a non-Muslim man while the Muslim man is allowed to marry non-Muslim women, a woman cannot pass her nationality on to her foreign husband and children while the man can, “honour killing” of a woman by a male relative results in a light sentence for murder,and two women equal one man in legal testimony, witness, and inheritance. Such maltreatment of one half of Syria’s society is in spite of the regime’s energetic attempts to project an image of secularism, modernity, and equality between the genders.

The Islamic curriculum in Syria’s elementary, middle, and high schools teaches Muslim Sunni Islam regardless of the Islamic sect to which they belong. The textbooks are discriminatory, divisive, and intolerant of non-Muslims.[viii]

......

To flaunt his Islamic credentials, President Bashar Asad even ordered a special rain prayer throughout Syria's mosques performed on December 10, 2010 in order for God to send rain.

Following the March 2011 violent demonstrations, Mr. Asad acted to gain support from the Sunni palace ulama and mollify the Sunni street. The popular Sunni cleric Muhammad Saiid al-Bouti praised Mr. Asad’s response to many of the requests submitted by a number of Sunni clerics. In his weekly religious program on April 5, 2011 on Syrian government television, Sheikh al-Bouti applauded Mr. Asad’s permission to allow niqab-wearing (black face cover) female teachers; transferred in July 2010 to desk duties[ix], to return to classrooms. Sheikh al-Bouti had attributed the drought in December 2010 to the transfer from classrooms of the niqab-wearing female teachers. Sheikh al-Bouti also praised Mr. Asad for the formation of the Sham Institute for Advanced Shari’a Studies and Research, and for the establishment of an Islamic satellite television station dedicated to proclaiming the message of true Islam.[x] Also, the first and only casino, which had enraged orthodox clerics when it opened on New Year’s Eve, was closed as well.[xi]

.....

Islam is helpful to Muslim rulers. Not only in Syria, other Arab regimes (except Lebanon and Tunisia) exploit Islam to stay in power.[xii] Islam demands obedience of Muslims to the Muslim ruler.

The Quran, the Prophetic Sunna, and opinions of famous jurists enjoin Muslims to obey the Muslim ruler blindly. In 4:59, the Quran orders: “Obey God and obey God’s messenger and obey those of authority among you.” Answering how a Muslim should react to a ruler who does not follow the true guidance, the Prophet reportedly said, according to Sahih Muslim: “He who obeys me obeys God; he who disobeys me, disobeys God. He who obeys the ruler, obeys me; he who disobeys the ruler, disobeys me.”[xiii] Abi Da’ud (d. 888) and Ibn Maja (d. 886) quote the Prophet as imploring Muslims to hear and obey the ruler, even if he were an Ethiopian slave.[xiv] Al-Bukhari (d. 870) quotes similar traditions.[xv] The palace ulama invoke one thousand year old opinions of famous jurists such as Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), Ibn Jama’a (1241-1333), and Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328). These men taught that the Muslim ruler must be obeyed blindly because even an unjust ruler is better than societal unrest.

Syria’s palace ulama threaten the Muslim faithful with eternal damnation if they fail to obey Mr. Asad (waliy al-amr). In the hands of the Asad clan, Islam has become a psychological weapon supplementing a brutal security machine.

http://www.refworld.org/docid/532021f14.html 

Several sources state that Jehovah's Witnesses are banned in Syria (TEAJCW 2 Mar. 2011; AI 9 July 2010; US 17 Nov. 2010) and that this ban has been in place since 1964 (AI 9 July 2010; TEAJCW 2 Mar. 2011). The US Department of State's International Religious Freedom Report 2006 states that in 1964, the Syrian government branded Jehovah's Witnesses as being "a 'politically motivated Zionist organization" (US 2007).

Assad & Christians/minorities




https://twitter.com/JoumanaGebara/status/814015749203382272
I urge you to read the speech of #HafezAssad 1976 when #Syria invaded #Lebanon: -We enter #Lebanon because Syria & Lebanon are one country


In speech Hafez Assad calls #Christians of #Lebanon extremists supported by #US #Syria didnt enter to protect them but to exterminate them






http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/religion/332938-dont-be-fooled-assad-is-no-friend-of-syrias-christian-minorities#bottom-story-socials

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.
....

Christians are not safe in Assad’s Syria. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, over 60 percent of all churches in Syria that have been destroyed during the war have been by the Assad regime. Many Christians have been killed by Assad’s indiscriminate barrel bombs and aerial attacks in the past six years most notably many who were bombed to death by Assad warplanes and attacked by Hezbollah in Yabroud, a mixed Christian-Muslim town along the Lebanese border that was a bright spot for interfaith relations among Syrians after it was liberated from Assad in 2012.

Assad views Christians as a sectarian card used to preserve his interests and preserve his regime. While Assad sends delegations of priests all around the world, including the United States, to defend his regime and Hezbollah, have we forgotten the Christian priest who was murdered and dragged through the streets by Syrian security agents for defying Assad during the mid-2000s Kurdish revolt?

 




http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=dc2_1384280565&comments=1#cJo2BUm8cYBEvz3T.99 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih0aCHnjDko
Hafez al-Assad's atrocities against Christians in Zahle, Bekka valley, Lebanon

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111904060604576571084234840342
But Syria's leaders target Christians specifically. Christians are the first to be persecuted whenever there are rumblings of opposition to the regime. In 1978, I survived the 100 Days' war in Ashrafieh, a Christian district of Beirut. Just as is the case today in Homs and Hama in the Syrian hinterland, Ashrafieh was encircled, deprived of food and water, and pounded with heavy machine guns, artillery and tanks. Many of my young friends died in such battles.

A few years later, in 1981, the Syrian Army besieged Zahle, a Christian stronghold in the Bekaa Valley. Zahle's population was deprived of water and basic supplies, and the Syrian Army attacked the city's defenders with full force. Many of my friends lost their lives that summer defending their ancestral land and their right to freedom. In 1982, the Syrian Army assassinated a newly elected Christian President of Lebanon, without any hint of regret, accountability or remorse. For Syria, it was business as usual.

Fast-forward to 2005, when Syrian-occupied Lebanon saw a series of assassinations, among them the killing of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. A scare campaign in the Christian neighborhoods followed, in the form of random bombings and nightly explosions. What was Syria's message? We can kill a Sunni leader, but if the Christians call for our withdrawal from Lebanon, your fate will be darker than at the hand of your Sunni fellow Lebanese.

http://www.aina.org/releases/syrias.htm

18 August 2000: The conspicuously abrupt water demarcation lines in the area of the Assyrian villages is a consequence of both the severity of the current drought and, more importantly, a result of primitive and corrupt Syrian governmental environmental policy as well as the government's inherent hostility towards the politically disenfranchised Assyrian community.

In the past, the Syrian government has been unfairly hostile to local Assyrian efforts to improve the dire water situation. On June 24, 1997, the Syrian government arrested four members of the Assyrian Democratic Organization (ADO), including a former member of parliament, in Hassaka who had initiated a project to bring potable water via tankers to the parched Assyrian Khabur villages (AINA June 25, 1997). The four men were eventually released, three of whom only after several months of incarceration and standard Syrian mistreatment. Despite lacking any legitimate legal merit, the trials of the three were never dismissed, but rather continued indefinitely in order to allow the government the pretext to reconvene the trial at their whim any time in the future.

http://souriahouria.com/what-if-bashar-assad-wins-by-mustafa-khalifa/ 
https://twitter.com/joeyayoub/status/801008909481836548 
Mustafa Khalifa, a Syrian Christian tortured by the Assad regime, predicted in 2012 how it would use minorities.



http://brockley.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/assad-v-isis-patrick-cockburns-economy.html?m=1
Among the examples we could cite of non-alignment between the regime and minorities would be: the Syriac Union Party(SUP) and its anti-government "Sutoro" forces based in Christian areas, which is closely allied with the Kurdish PYD, as are other Syriac Christian groups; the Assyrian Democratic Organization affiliated to the opposition Syrian National Council; the prominence of Allawites such as Fadwa Soliman, Monzer Makhous and female defector General Zubaida al-Meeki in the opposition, alongside prominent Christians such as George Sabra and Michael Kilo; recent reports of Armenian and Allawite militias turning arms against the regime in Homs; the anti-regime activism of Druze youth in Suweida; the continued defection of Druze from regime forces; the universal condemnation from the Southern Front rebels of al-Nusra repression of the Druze in Idlib; and the fact that Israeli humanitarian support for rebels in the South is conditional on their good treatment of Druze.


https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2884/assad-slaughtering-syrian-christians
27 Feb 2012: Syrian dictator Bashar Assad's security forces last week killed Husam al Murra, a Syrian Christian who had joined the Syrian Free Army, which is fighting to topple the regime in Damascus.

Assad is angry with the Christians in his country because most of them have refused to support his atrocities against the Syrian people.
He is also angry with them because many Christians have played a major role in relief work to help the victims of Assad's bloody crackdown on his opponents.
At the beginning of the uprising, Assad's government forced leaders of the Christian community in Syria to hold public events in support of the regime. The leaders were instructed to pledge their loyalty to Assad and condemn the opposition as a "bunch of terrorists backed by the Zionists and the US."
But as Assad's forces stepped up their massacres and repression of the people, most Christians began speaking out against the regime, especially on Facebook and other social media networking.
...Al Murra is not the first Syrian Christian to be killed by Assad's security forces since the beginning of the popular uprising nearly a year ago.
In recent weeks, several other Christian men have been shot and killed in different parts of the country. One of the victims was a priest from the city of Hama, who was killed while trying to provide humanitarian and medical aid to people injured by Syrian army gunfire.
According to a Christian lawyer in Damascus, Assad's security forces have also begun targeting churches, monasteries and schools under the pretext that they were being used as hideouts for "armed gangs."
Many Christians have stopped going to Church on Sundays, and some Christian schools have been forced to shut down out of fear of being targeted by Assad loyalists.
According to Open Doors, an international ministry supporting persecuted Christians around the world, more than 80% of Christians have fled the city of Homs, where fighting is the worst.
An Italian priest who had been living in Syria for the past two decades was asked to leave the country after he voiced public support for the Syrian people's struggle for reform and democracy.
"Most Christians in Syria are against this murderous regime," said George Saba, a Christian teacher from Damascus who fled to Jordan three months ago. "The Syrian authorities have been trying to force our leaders to support Assad in public. No Christian could ever support such heinous crimes against women and children."

http://www.npr.org/2012/05/29/153937342/student-helped-the-world-see-inside-a-ravaged-syria
29 May 2012: Bassel Shehadeh, a Christian budding Syrian filmmaker, left Syracuse University and returned to his homeland, where he filmed the uprising. He was recently killed during fighting in the central city of Homs.


https://twitter.com/alanagoodman/status/380016772680019968
http://freebeacon.com/politics/christians-and-syria/
17 Sep 2013: “The idea that somehow [Assad] was a protector of Christians is just absurd,” said Tony Badran, a Middle East expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who was born and raised in Lebanon. “He’s a protector of himself and his regime. Anyone who gets in the way will be eliminated.”

While Christians in Syria largely support Assad, there are Christians among the opposition, most notably George Sabra, who served as president of Syria’s chief opposition group until July. Rev. Paolo Dall’Oglio, a prominent critic of Assad, was forcibly exiled in 2012, and activist Basil Shehadi was supporting the opposition when a regime sniper reportedly killed him.

Ahed al-Hendi, a Christian Syrian opposition activist who moved to the United States in 2007, objected to the notion that Assad has been good to religious minorities.

“[Assad] wants the Christians to protect him,” said Hendi. “He’s not protecting the Christians.”

......

The constitution passed in 2012 bars non-Muslims from becoming president. It is illegal to be a Jehovah’s Witness, which the government contends is too similar to Judaism. There are also laws against proselytizing, an obstacle for certain Christian sects.

They are also subject to the same general persecution as the rest of the population, including arbitrary imprisonment, forced exile, and restrictions on political activity, Middle East experts note.

“Under [Assad’s] command, it’s not like [Christians] have privileges,” said Badran. “They were basically allowed to exist as apolitical creatures. You can do your rituals, you can do whatever you need to do. But they’re not in a position of power or anything like that.”

A propaganda battle recently broke out between the opposition and the regime, after the Christian village of Maaloula was seized by the Free Syrian Army and the rebel-affiliated jihadist group al-Nusra Front. The rebels released videos claiming they would not harm the town’s inhabitants, while the regime released videos showing violence and damage to churches, reported Haaretz.

“I don’t think Assad [an Alawite] has a particular religious ideology, but this is one way for Assad to blackmail the West … to use the fear [of] terrorists and radicalism,” said Joseph Gebeily, a Lebanese Maronite who says he was forcibly exiled by the Assad-backed Lebanese government in 1993. Gebeily is also president of the Lebanese Information Center, which supports a U.S. strike on Syria.

......

Gebeily recalled Syrian military attacks on Christian areas during the war, such as the 1978 siege on a Beirut district and the 1981 attack on the city of Zahle.

“We all of a sudden have developed amnesia as to who this [Assad] guy is and what his history is and his father’s history, is,” he said.

Critics also note Bashar al-Assad’s suspected role in the assassination campaign against political opponents in Lebanon, including prominent Christians.

Christian parliament members Gibran Tueni and Antoine Ghanem and military officer Gen. Francois al-Hajj were killed in car bombings 2005 and 2007. Cabinet member Pierre Gemayel was gunned down in 2006. Christian leader Samir Geagea and journalist May Chidiac were targeted by failed assassination attempts in 2012 and 2005.

“[The Assad regime] waged war against Christian villages in Lebanon, systematically assassinated Christian political and cultural figures,” said Badran.


https://en.qantara.de/content/syrian-christians-and-the-assad-regime-assad-is-only-protecting-himself 

13 July 2014: The Syrian national Ayman Abdulnour is the group's spokesperson, a former fellow student of and adviser to President Bashar al-Assad, who officially broke with the regime in Damascus in 2007 and has been living in exile ever since.

The appeal was disseminated by, among others, the France-based NGO "Souriahouria", a Franco-Syrian network which counts prominent Syrian intellectuals and creative artists among its members and by its own account, supports the Syrian revolution against the Assad regime.

The open letter by the "Syrian Christians for Peace" in mid-May 2014 was not the first public statement against the Assad regime issued by Syrian Christians. Back in March 2014, exiled Christian Syrians in Germany and Switzerland initiated a similar appeal, the "Declaration of democratic Syrian Christians". Among other things, they called for Syria to become a democratic state under the rule of law, where all citizens enjoy equal rights and where religion and the state are properly separated. An excerpt from the text, which can be called up on Facebook, reads:

http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/04/17/400360836/syrias-minorities-caught-between-sword-of-isis-and-wrath-of-assad
18 April 2015: While some Ismailis and Druze have enlisted in government paramilitaries over the past two years, most refuse. In general, they do not want to be deployed to distant fronts that are not immediate threats to their community. Yet they are also wary of being deployed closer to home where they could find themselves fighting in neighboring Sunni communities, creating bad blood that could outlast the war.

Karim Bitar, a Middle East analyst at Paris think tank IRIS, calls this wartime predicament "the tragic dilemma" of minorities.

"Politically, morally and even strategically, there are no good options, mainly because the short-term interests of minorities might be at odds with long-term interests," Bitar says. "Minorities are often used as a shield by authoritarian regimes, who try to portray themselves as protectors and as a bulwark against radical Islam."

In turn, "minorities risk being perceived as a fifth column against the aspirations of the oppressed majority."

One Assyrian Christian man, who in February escaped an ISIS attack against his village in northeastern Syria, put it this way: "The regime wants to be seen in the eyes of the world as the protector of the minorities. But they are spectators."

http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/syrian-christians-tel-tamer-hold-out-against-kurdish-help-1389462098
13 May 2015:

In Syria’s sectarian breakdown the Christians - around 10 percent of the pre-war population - are usually considered to side with the government. But in Hassakeh they are cut off - both physically and socially - from the large and metropolitan Christian communities in the government heartlands of Damascus and western Aleppo. While President Bashar al-Assad claims to be the man who will protect Syria’s minorities, many people here have long lost faith in his will or ability to do so.

In early 2013, the Assyrian Christians of Hassakeh founded their own opposition militia - the Syriac Military Council. Many of its members, like Kino Gabriel, an articulate former dental student who is now the militia’s spokesman, had taken part in anti-government demonstrations in 2011 and felt themselves part of the mainstream opposition movement.

....

The YPG, though, has never openly opposed Assad, and has, at times, fought directly against the Free Syrian Army – once the would-be allies of the Syriac Military Council.

Now, the Christians, the Kurds and the government coexist in an uneasy harmony in Hassakeh Province, alongside numerous Sunni tribal militias and the National Defence Forces (neighbourhood militias armed and funded by the government). Even before international airstrikes began pounding the area last summer, the political patchwork here was one of the most tangled in Syria.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/in-new-sign-of-assads-troubles-syrias-druze-turn-away-from-president/2015/07/17/eaf06874-18f7-11e5-bed8-1093ee58dad0_story.html

20 July 2015: The Druze are not a monolith; after the uprising against Assad began in 2011, some joined the rebels. But the majority have remained effectively aligned with Assad.

Over the past year, however, the Druze have become increasingly disillusioned with Assad as the war has taken a growing toll on the population, particularly the armed forces. More than 230,000 people have died in the conflict.

The Druze have bristled at the government’s campaign to shore up the army — which has included large-scale mobilizations of reservists and mass arrests of draft-dodgers. Many Druze have refused military service, analysts say.

Desertions and draft-dodging are also increasing among other minorities that usually side with the government, such as Christians and Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

The Druze, as well as other minorities, are growing more nervous that the government will be unable — and perhaps unwilling — to protect them from the advancing rebels.

In Sweida, Wahid al-Balous, a Druze spiritual leader, has raised a militia of thousands of men that is intended to defend the Druze, according to analysts and local residents. Such a move would have been almost unthinkable a year ago, when momentum in the war appeared to be on Assad’s side.

 .....

Druze leaders are calling for neutrality to signal to the rebels that they are not their enemies while also not alienating the government, said Malek Abou al-Kheir, a Druze journalist from southern Syria who is critical of the government.

“They know that the regime is not a true ally,” Kheir said.

A group of moderate rebels, known as the Southern Front, says that it has assured the Druze that it will protect them should government forces withdraw from Sweida.

“They know that we will do more to protect them than Assad ever will,” said Marwan Ahmad, a Druze and former colonel in the Syrian army who is now a member of the rebel coalition.

But declarations of neutrality may not save the Druze if extremists from the Islamic State or Jabhat al-Nusra — Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate — seize their ancestral lands. Both groups condemn the Druze as apostates. Last month, militants from Jabhat al-Nusra gunned down more than 20 Druze in northern Syria in what was said to be a property dispute.

https://redflag.org.au/node/5577 

5 Nov 2016: My name is Miream Salameh. I’m a Syrian refugee artist who came to Australia three years ago.

I am from a Christian family. I never needed to say that here or in my country because Muslims and Christians always live together in harmony and peace, but I say this today because I need to explain that my family and I escaped from the Syrian regime violence before ISIS even existed in my country.

The Assad regime claims that it protects minorities like us from extremist groups. That is not true. The regime protects itself by using minorities as a playing card to tell Western societies that it is the only source of protection for us.

....

During the revolution, I was an activist. I recorded videos to document Assad’s abuses, and my friend and I established a magazine. We had to stop publishing it after only six months because the regime twice attacked the place we were meeting in and committed horrific massacres there. In one instance, this included killing 20 young men and arresting 150 people, among them women who were stripped naked in public.

Later, I started to receive many arrest, rape and death threats from Syrian security. I was forced to leave my home, my memories and all my life to go to Lebanon. I had no choice but to flee.

At this time my art teacher and the closest person to my heart, Wael Kasstoun, was arrested by Syrian intelligence and tortured to death. His only crime was refusing to draw a painting that supported the regime. His body was found by accident in a military hospital among 200 bodies. Syrian security was preparing to bury them in a mass grave without letting their families know where they were or what happened to them.

http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/syriasource/on-the-anniversary-of-hafez-al-assad-s-death-how-he-divided-the-alawite-sect
https://www.newsdeeply.com/syria/articles/2016/06/29/how-hafez-al-assad-divided-the-alawite-sect
29 June 2016: Aside from the Assad family, other family mafias, such as the Shalish and Jaber families, have transformed Qardaha into an area where Syrian constitutional law has no influence. Dozens of Alawite villages throughout the Jableh and Tartus countrysides live without basic services or facilities, their residents suffering from extreme poverty. The poverty of these areas helped the regime build up its military base, since the Alawites viewed the army as a means to improve their livelihoods. Also, many of them were not able to pay a fee (or bribe) required to avoid military service. On the other hand, the largely Sunni middle class viewed the army as inferior and were able to pay their way out of military service. Over the past years, young Alawites became involved in security positions that provided them with a decent salary and level of authority, with the percentage of officers and Alawites in some branches occasionally exceeding 90 percent.
......
The relationship between the regime and Alawites has developed to the point where some Alawites prioritize preserving the regime over their country. One example is Suheil al-Hassan, an Alawite officer who is said to have invented the explosive “barrel bombs” that war planes and helicopters drop on civilians in opposition-controlled neighborhoods, thus saving Bashar’s treasury tens of millions of dollars on rockets and other weapons, and subsequently leading to the deaths of thousands of civilians.
The number of Alawite homes without family members killed or disabled in the coastal cities and villages is diminishing. The situation in Syria is now a civil war in which the remains of Assad’s regime feed off the sectarian tensions and their effects. Such was the case in the latest bombings of Jableh and Tartus, where an outburst of anti-Sunni slogans was permitted among the Alawites, and each Sunni living in the coastal cities became a suspect, regardless of whether he was a supporter or an opponent. The case of a soldier captured by an Alawite militia during the bombings is a clear example. The soldier was accused of being a terrorist, but it was later revealed that he had been fighting with the Syrian army. Al-Alam News aired an interview with him in which he explained the sectarian rhetoric and method that was used to demean him and turn him into a potential terrorist.
The Alawites now live in an atmosphere of sorrow at the current situation. Many lament how the homeland has been reduced to the person of Bashar al-Assad in recent years. They understand the suffering that has spread through Syria and see that Bashar has brought Syria to ruin. On the other hand, the opposition does not provide a political vision or try to win over this community, despite the fact that they must live together in the future and that prominent Alawites such as Monzer Makhous continue to exist within the opposition’s political ranks.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9193394/Syria-Easter-cancelled-in-Homs-after-churches-bombed.html
8 April 2012: For the first time in centuries no services were held to mark the festival of Easter in Christian churches of war-torn Homs as the Syria government inflicted a heavy bombardment in defiance of UN-brokered ceasefire talks.
.....

The three principal churches for Christian denominations in the city, which until a few months ago was home to Syria’s third largest Christian community, were virtually abandoned. Other small churches have been destroyed as private homes became the places of worship on Sunday with priests and locals gathering in secret.

All are located in districts have been left devastated by weeks of heavy shelling.

“There is no celebration. For one week, there have been no sounds coming from the churches or the mosques,” said Saleem, a resident speaking from his home in Homs Old City, where most of the churches are located.

“Government forces have shelled the area this morning. It is too dangerous to go outside”.

......

Two weeks ago Moussa’s relatives fled from Homs as government forces began shelling the Christian neighbourhoods of Hamidiyah and Boustan al-Diwan where they lived. Videos of the area show streets riddled with debris, and concrete buildings shattered by shells and bullet holes.

“The windows of my grandfather’s home were shattered by shelling,” said Moussa. “The regime doesn’t care anymore, they are targeting all neighbourhoods, and mosques and churches.”

“It is too dangerous to go to Church, as the regime is even shelling these,” said Saif al Arab, an activist in Homs who claimed to be in contact with Christians in his neighbourhood. “There is not enough food for them to celebrate in the traditional way. This is not a celebration, they gathered to pray for the people who have been killed in the bombardments”.

http://www.rubincenter.org/2012/04/syria%e2%80%99s-31-percenters-how-bashar-al-asad-built-minority-alliances-and-countered-minority-foes/
April 2012: Nonetheless, for many Middle Eastern Christians, Syria’s Ba’thists would not constitute “natural allies.” During the 15-year Lebanese Civil War, Christian autonomy and power was crushed in Lebanon and thousands of Christians were killed by Syrian forces. Lebanese Christian leaders were repeatedly assassinated or politically countered by pro-Syrian forces.  Further decreasing Asad’s viability as a “Christian ally” in Lebanon, was that the Syrian regime had initially exploited alliances with small Christian groups based on family connections or through the utilization of hard power.[44]
......
In 2010, the Syrian government moved to clamp down on evangelical Christians. The Economist reported that “the main reason for the clampdown is that Orthodox and Catholic leaders, disgruntled by the success of these new churches, have complained to the government.”[65] The regime’s move allowed for the populous and more easily controlled traditional churches to have their interests served while increasing positive perceptions of the government among church leaders.
Even with all of the advances of goodwill made toward the Christian community, the regime still took a heavier-handed approach to dealing with some Christian political groups. Parties promoting liberal or reformist agendas often faced crackdowns. While it reflects certain pragmatism to use nationalist groups to voice regime-backed concerns, it also demonstrates the government had limits.
The Assyrian Democratic Organization (ADO), considered the Syrian branch of the Iraq-based Assyrian Democratic Movement (Zowa’a), is one such example. When ADO signed the 2005 reformist Damascus Declaration, it caused the group to suffer a number of government crackdowns.[66] In May 2011, the group’s Qamishili offices were raided by Syrian security forces. According to an ADO press statement, “the overwhelming majority of the individuals who were arrested did not participate in the protests today [May 20 protests against the regime].”[67]


https://twitter.com/DarthNader/status/241084297870733312
30 August 2012: Assad warplanes protect minorities in Homs! Look what they did to this Christian neighborhood: http://bit.ly/RtMW24 

https://twitter.com/Psypherize/status/257403871507382272

14 Oct 2012: Pierre Gabriel, a Christian from #Aleppo who died trying to protect the Umayyad Mosque from #Assad's thugs. #Syria http://twitpic.com/b415e8 

http://www.aymennjawad.org/12643/syria-assyrians
Dec 7, 2012: In Syria today, the local branch of the Iraq-based Assyrian Democratic Movement has been a part of the opposition Syrian National Council since the beginning of the unrest in March of last year.
This local branch known as the "Assyrian Democratic Organization" has been targeted numerous times by the Syrian government, particularly after it became a signatory to the Damascus Declaration of October 2005 that criticized Bashar Assad's regime and called for a process of democratic reform in Syria.
However, the ADO's stance in support of the opposition differs from that of the Assyrian Church of the East hierarchy, which prefers to maintain a position of neutrality, similar to its stance on Kurdish-Assyrian relations in Iraq.
......
A village near Hasakeh was recently bombed by regime forces on the grounds that rebels were hiding there. The local church and several homes were destroyed, and one student was killed.


https://twitter.com/AbulFidaHamwi/status/285539362073104384
30 Dec 2012: @Psypherize another brave Christian FSA fighter, Nasser Bishara, was martyred recently

https://twitter.com/NorthernStork/status/848529508940623872
2 April 2017:  Assad and Iran-backed militias attacking rebel-held Halfaya from Christian town Muhardah north #Hama to provoke rebels return the fire.


https://www.facebook.com/syrianchristiansforpeace/?hc_ref=PAGES_TIMELINE&fref=nf
https://twitter.com/QalaatAlMudiq/status/849925446343041025
https://twitter.com/GIIMedia/status/850063828977143808
3 April 2017: Syrian Christians complaining occupation by Iranian militias  #Mahrada used as human shield to cause sectarian animosity English Translation


https://twitter.com/mel75801/status/851035026393370626
9 April 2017: #Christian villages Mahardah & Suqayliya in #Hama #Syria are being by #Assad & #Iran as human shield to kill #Sunni around those villages


http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/05/syria-sanctions-bill-congress-debate-assad-christians.html#ixzz4ikN5poIJ
3 May 2017:

Supporters of Engel's bill countered that Assad is the one who precipitated a civil war that has killed a half million people and displaced more than 6.5 million, including countless Christians. They point out that a number of Syrian groups support the legislation, including Syrian Christians for Peace, the Syria Campaign, the Syrian American Council, the Coalition for a Democratic Syria and the Syrian Emergency Task Force. 

The bill is named after Caesar, the former Syrian army photographer who fled with a treasure trove of photographs that appear to document mass torture and killings in Assad's prisons. A number of the victims have since been identified.

"The Caesar photos that this committee has had the opportunity to see indeed included Christian and Muslim torture victims," said Rep. Bill Keating, D-Mass. "The Assad regime is also responsible for over 60% of destroyed churches in Syria."

Read more: 



Regime-sponsored Islamism


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4681294.stm
4 Feb 2006: Syrians have set fire to the Norwegian and Danish embassies in Damascus in protest at the publication of newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Protesters scaled the Danish site amid chants of "God is great", before moving on to attack the Norwegian mission.  Denmark and Norway condemned Syria for failing its international obligations and urged their citizens to leave.


http://www.latimes.com/news/la-fg-muslims6feb06-story.html#

Feb 6, 2006: Syrian protesters set fire to the Norwegian and Danish embassies in Damascus on Saturday. The governments of the United States and Norway have placed the blame for that rioting squarely on the Syrian government for failing to protect the embassies.

"It's totally unacceptable, and we are going to raise the question with the United Nations because this is a violation of international law," Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told Reuters.

But Syria blamed Denmark for the violence. The Danish government should have apologized for the caricatures, published in the Danish independent newspaper Jyllands-Posten, said an editorial in Syria's state-run daily newspaper. The Danish prime minister and Jyllands-Posten apologized last week if the cartoons gave offense, but upheld the newspaper's right to print them.

But many observers quietly questioned how intense unrest could possibly erupt in a country as tightly controlled as Syria — unless there was tacit approval from the regime. Attempts to stage similar demonstrations over the Palestinian uprising and the war in Iraq have been brutally squashed in recent years.

And many Lebanese suspected Syria's hand in the streets of Beirut on Sunday. After sending soldiers into Lebanon during the civil war, Damascus remained the de facto ruler of its neighbor for years before withdrawing its soldiers last spring. Even now, many Lebanese complain of Syrian meddling and blame Damascus for a string of political assassinations, including the death last year of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in a bombing that also killed 22 others on a Beirut street.

A U.N. commission investigating Hariri's assassination has implicated top Lebanese and Syrian security officials.

"These are people who want to destabilize the country," said Lebanese Tourism Minister Joseph Sarkis, who drove through the Christian neighborhoods under armed guard to appeal for calm as the riots quieted down. "They are receiving orders from the source we all know to provoke a clash between the communities."

Lebanon's Grand Mufti Mohammed Rashid Kabbani also blamed infiltrators for the violence, which he called an attempt to "harm the stability of Lebanon."

Lebanese have been warning for months that Syria might try to provoke unrest by tampering with Lebanon's delicate religious balance.

"Syria wanted to make another war in Lebanon, and they want the war to be between Christians and Muslims again," said Michel Saouma, a 34-year-old sales manager. "So they did this thing to show the world that the people of Lebanon cannot live by themselves."

Of the more than 170 protesters arrested, 76 were Syrian, Reuters reported. An additional 38 were Lebanese, 35 were Palestinian and 25 were stateless Bedouins.
....
As they moved through the streets toward the Danish Consulate, some demonstrators spray-painted slogans on storefronts and ripped down commemorative posters of Gibran Tueni, the critic of Syria and Christian newspaper publisher who was assassinated in December.
"This is not violence, this is the right of every Muslim to fight for the prophet," said Ali Allameh, a bearded cleric whose hair was tied back with a bandanna. "Those who insult the prophet are not people, are not human beings. They're pigs and chimpanzees. Even pigs are better than these people."

https://www.ifex.org/syria/2006/02/15/moroccan_newspaper_says_it_is_a/
http://www.irinnews.org/fr/node/195162
12 Feb 2006: Following violent protests last week in the capital, Damascus, against negative depictions of the prophet Mohamed in a Danish newspaper, charges have been filed against a journalist who called for peaceful dialogue to settle the issue.  Following his arrest on 7 February, journalist Adel Mahfouz has been charged with insulting public religious sentiment, an offence under Syrian criminal law. He could face up to three years in prison if found guilty.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDUJNetz8eM 
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/3142.htm 
http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/3142.htm 
9 Oct 2011:  

Mufti of Syria Ahmad Badr Al-Din Hassoun Threatens to Activate Suicide Bombers in Europe and the U.S.

Following are excerpts from a public address delivered by Ahmad Badr Al-Din Hassoun Mufti of Syria, which aired on Syria News TV and was posted on the Internet on October 9, 2011: Ahmad Badr Al-Din Hassoun: The moment the first missile hits Syria, all the sons and daughters of Lebanon and Syria will set out to become martyrdom-seekers in Europe and on Palestinian soil. I say to all of Europe and to the US: We will prepare martyrdom-seekers who are already among you, if you bomb Syria or Lebanon. From now on, it will be "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and he who dealt the first blow is more unjust," and you are the ones who have done us an injustice. I say to every Arab and to every human being: Do not think that the people who will commit martyrdom in France, Britain, or the US, will be Arabs and Muslims. They will be a new Jules Jammal or a new Muhammad Al-Durrah. They will all be like the righteous [of the past]. I beg you not to come near our country.

http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/jihad-in-syria-part-ii-the-assad-regime-perspective-by-aymenn-jawad-al-tamimi/
http://www.aymennjawad.org/13111/jihad-in-syria-part-ii
25 March 2013: Earlier this month, many observers were surprised by a statement issued by the Supreme Iftaa Council, whose leader is Mufti Ahmad Hassoun, the most senior Sunni cleric in Syria as Grand Mufti, with strong ties to the regime. The council's fatwa was a call for jihad to defend Assad's government.
.....
Among the regime-aligned clergy, consider the case of the recently assassinated Sheikh Muhammad Said Ramadan al-Buti. Buti was one of those behind the above fatwa. One thing to notice immediately is that the fatwa does not accept any identity for Syria beyond the Arab one, despite the fact that Buti was Kurdish by heritage: a perfect example of the fulfillment of Aflaq's Arabist ideology for a state. In his writings, Buti touched on the subject of jihad on more than one occasion.
.....
For the Assad regime, which in keeping with Ba'athist ideology claims to protect 'true' Islam, this kind of discourse posed no problem. Jihad as warfare- offensive or defensive- is not only acceptable but also desirable so long as it is directed at the right targets.
Thus there was no real ideological contradiction in sending jihadists into Iraq while playing a part as a torture destination for international terrorist suspects in the CIA's rendition program: it is just that the latter jihadists were regarded as practicing an illegitimate form of jihad in a posing a perceived threat to Syria itself.
And so it is with the present Syrian civil war: attacking the Assad regime- so the reasoning goes- is not really jihad at all. One should observe that in criticizing the rebels, Syrian state media never attack the concept of jihad per se; instead the jihadist rebels- seen as al-Qa'ida-aligned and working for foreign powers- are denounced as 'terrorists,' 'takfiris,' 'Wahhabis' or agents of 'Zionism' (on the last, cf. the fatwa itself).
Instead, those who wage true jihad fight for the regime. Those who wage true jihad will defend the unity of the Syrian Arab nation and thus also the Arab and Islamic nation from the sinister forces that seek to tear both apart.
Now one can understand how a band of Assad loyalists in Raqqah- where the regime as in the Aleppo area forged significant Sunni Arab loyalist ties- vowed to fight 'true jihad against the Free Army and Jabhat al-Nusra' in a video that emerged this month during the fall of that city to rebel forces (hat-tip: @Syrian_Scenes).



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syriac_Union_Party_(Syria)#Persecution_by_the_Assad_regime
2013: 
The Syriac Union Party has been subject to continued repression by the Assad government during the civil war, despite being part of the nonviolent and officially-tolerated domestic opposition National Coordination Body. On 6 June 2013, government forces raided the Qamishli home of SUP Executive Committee member Rubel Gabriel Bahho, arresting and subsequently imprisoning him.^[5] On 12 August 2013, security forces apprehended SUP vice-president Sait Malki Cosar—the father of Sutoro leader Johann Cosar—as he disembarked at Qamishli Airport following a visit to Switzerland, where he holds dual citizenship.^[6] After being detained in Qamishli for several days, Cosar was transferred to a prison near Damascus and contact with him was lost.^[7] Neither party official is known to have been formally charged or tried in court, and neither has been released or heard from since their imprisonment.^[8] Their fates remain unknown as of February 2014.
Cosar is rumoured to have died under shadowy circumstances while in custody.^[7] The government produced a death certificate for Cosar that stated he died in Damascus of supposed "cardiac arrest" at either 10:00^[9] or 10:25^[6] PM on the day of his arrest, even though his flight did not even land in Qamishli until 10:30 PM.^[6] But despite requests from both the SUP and Cosar's family, government officials have refused to release his body.^[7] Cosar's relatives reportedly managed to track down the doctors in Damascus who signed the death certificate, who told them that the government frequently forces doctors to sign death certificates for detainees without allowing them to even see a corpse.^[6][9] Friends, family members, and party colleagues alike believe that Cosar may still be alive,^[6] and have alleged that the government is trying to conceal the fact that he has been tortured in custody.^[9]


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/22/syria-sunnis-fear-alawite-ethnic-cleansing
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10195849/Bashar-al-Assads-militias-cleansing-Homs-of-Sunni-Muslims.html
July 22, 2013:  It has also taken on a sectarian character, with the army on Monday bombarding the Sunni mausoleum of Khaled bin Walid, a companion of Prophet Mohammed. Whether this was intentional or a mistake is unclear.
After each campaign, howver, Alawite civilians and loyalist paramilitaries from the National Defence Force have stormed the newly recaptured towns and villages, looting Sunni homes and often setting them on fire, with the apparent aim of ensuring that the owners have nothing left to return to.
........
Talkalakh is surrounded by 52 largely Alawite villages, where people are now leading the campaign against their Sunni neighbours, according to refugees.
"This is not just about criminals wanting to make money. They want to kill all the Sunnis," said Fayez, a resident of Talkalakh who fled with his family to neighbouring Lebanon. "We used to hear them at night. They used to scream down from their villages 'we are coming for you. We don't want Sunni's on our land'."
Other residents told the Telegraph that Alawite neighbours are now storing the stolen goods on their farms.
Most of the Sunnis of Talkalakh have now fled, but those who have stayed are being given incentives to leave. Alawite businessmen from neighbourhing villages are offering to buy the homes of Sunnis, on the condition that they leave: "They come up to people and say 'we can buy your house. You need the money and why do you want to stay in this village? It's better to get out'," said one man speaking by phone from Talkalakh.
The attacks have not been discouraged by the government. Residents say the Syrian army has watched the looters from the sidelines, and in some cases helped them.
In Homs, stolen goods are taken to a loyalist Alawite district and sold at what has become known as "the Sunni Market". A female activist, calling herself Yam al-Homsi, secretly filmed the market: "I pretended I wanted to buy a cheap laptop. The market has everything you can imagine; from Adidas trainers to furniture," she said.
"They even took the doors, tiles and electric cables from the homes. The Shabiha are organised: some loot the houses, whilst others sell the goods. They are not ashamed. One man told me it was a 'gift from the war'."
Over 500,000 refugees, most of them Sunni, have now fled into neighbouring Lebanon.


https://www.newsdeeply.com/syria/articles/2013/08/30/christians-besieged-in-homs-as-religious-lines-blur

August 30, 2013:  Christians who stayed in their neighborhoods alongside Muslim rebels, neutrality was not an acceptable position for the regime. Security checkpoints were erected in an attempt to separate mixed residential quarters. Attempts to remove the checkpoints were met with random shelling that did not differentiate between Christian and Muslim homes or churches and mosques.

....

“The mainly Christian districts of al-Hamidiyeh and Bustan al-Diwan suffered the brunt of the army bombardments due to their location in the heart of liberated [rebel-held] Homs. Residents were forced to flee at a moment’s notice, leaving most of their possessions behind. Those who remained suffered a worse fate of raids and massacres when regime forces advanced.”

....

Six churches dating back to the early part of last millennium and Christian schools dating to the 17th and 18th centuries were destroyed during the army shelling of al-Hamidiyeh and Bustan al-Diwan. The mosques in the area were not spared either.


http://syriadirect.org/news/iraqi-singers-mix-bullets-fatwas-in-music-video/

10 Dec 2013: TAKE US TO A-SHAM: Shiite singers Said Ahmad al-Mosawi and Bahaa al-Duhaibawi call their fellow Shiites to fight the FSA alongside the Syrian regime in a song that lays out the religious justifications for fighting in Damascus.

The singers show their allegiance to the Mahdi Army, Shiite religious leader’s Muqtada al-Sadr’s Iraqi militia. "Our weapons will diminish them [the FSA], we have a fatwa to kill them," they sing, referencing a religious edict to battle the FSA in Syria.

"We are Ali's Shia and they fear us," the song continues, as the camera’s focus shifts to photos of Muqtada al-Sadr and his late father, religious scholar Mohammad al-Sadr, who was killed by Saddam Hussein in 1999.

Hundreds of Iraqi Shiite fighters with the Liwa Abu al-Fadel al Abbas and Thu al-Fikr Brigade are in Syria guarding the Sit Zainab Shrine, a holy place for Shiites south of Damascus. They are also fighting alongside the Syrian army and Hezbollah forces in the Qalamoun region north of Damascus.

“At least 14 Shiite military battalions fighting alongside the regime forces with support of Maliki Government in Iraq,” the Syrian National Coalition said in a statement Monday.

For the second day in a row, the SNC repeated its accusation on Monday that the Thu al-Fikar Brigade had conducted massacres in Nabek in Qalamoun. "Sectarian regime mercenaries massacred 34 people, whole families among them, in the al-Fattah neighborhood in Nabek neighborhood in Outer Damascus,” the opposition-in-exile charged. Pro-regime media did not immediately respond.

Video courtesy of Alaa al-Maliki.

http://sn4hr.org/wp-content/pdf/english/the_most_massacres_committed_Shiite_militias.pdf
Jan 3, 2014: Sectarian massacres by Shiite militias in Syria




https://twitter.com/MouhanadAlrifay/status/430394828346511360
Feb 3,  2014: #Assad claims 2 protect Christians & tortures 2 death Christian opposition figures sons. RIP Wisam Fayez Sara. #Syria http://www.orient-news.net/index.php?page=news_show&id=7573 …


http://augustafreepress.com/iran-assad-hezbollah-using-christian-persecution-isis-hijack-minorities/
https://www.algemeiner.com/2014/09/09/has-pro-christian-conference-been-hijacked-by-pro-iranhezbollah-dhimmis/ 
Sep 9, 2014: This warning has been offered by the Middle East Christian Committee (MECHRIC), a consortium of activists from the Assyrian, Syriac, Chaldead, Maronite, Coptic, and Melkite groups in the United States.

MECHRIC warns that In Defense of Christians (IDC) is not playing it straight with the American public in its activism. MECHRIC says that instead of promoting the cause of religious freedom, the organization is using Sunni violence against Christians to promote support for Assad in Syria and normalization with the Mullahs in Iran – even if they’re not aware of it.
......
“Two Christian presidents, many Christian ministers, members of the parliament, and students were killed by the Assad regime, but the conference has ignored this tragedy and no speaker is slated to address the issue,” Hajjar warns.

“The conference is surely condemning the Jihadists of ISIS, but is ignoring the oppression by the Iranian regime against its own Christian community, particularly the Iranian Persian Christians,” Hajjar said.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-4E9NVDbAc 
https://unfetteredfreedom.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/the-alawite-tide-has-exploded-a-secular-song-for-a-secular-regime/ 

20 Oct 2014:  (9) Assad is portrayed as a “lion” of Shi’a Islam (and not as a leader of a united Syria of all sects and faiths) in an attempt to shore up his power base among the Shi’a/Alawite minorities. With Iran’s help, Assad has increasingly been trying to integrate the Alawites into the 12er Shi’a camp to further consolidate his rule. Iranian efforts to do this have gone on for some time.

(10) In the context of Syria, this line needs no explanation.

Also, note the iconography used in the video – Assad, decked out in fascist attire, is plastered alongside the Ba’athist flag. Yet the the flag of the Hezbollah also flies. Images of Imam Ali with his famous sword zulfiqar are also used. Images of lions appear (‘Assad’ means ‘lion’ in Arabic) and regime fighters step on the pre-Ba’athist Syrian flag.

The imagery is highly charged with hatred, but also confused. Assad’s supporters don’t seem to realise the absurd nature of the propaganda – they eulogise Assad as a leader who “protects” minorities, yet openly portray him as a Shi’a/Alawite hero. They utilise ‘secular’ imagery (e.g. the Ba’athist flag) alongside Twelver Shi’a symbols, portraying Assad as the leader of Syria, yet as only leading a fraction of the population. The message is an attempt at cohesion, yet makes little sense.

http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/8217.htm

Nov 13, 2014: Regime opponents believe that the extent of the 'Ashura ceremonies in the capital is but another expression of the Shi'ization process that not only has the Assad regime's blessing but was promoted by it even before the civil war broke out in March 2011. The regime's aim in this is both to reinforce its position within Syria and to reward Iran for its support of it.

According to opponents of the regime, this Shi'ization is both demographic and cultural. Demographically, since March 2011, and increasingly since the conflict evolved from a civil and political rebellion to a sectarian Sunni-Shi'ite struggle, the regime has been expelling Sunnis and offering Shi'ites incentives to settle in strategic locations, in order to populate these areas with its supports and also as an incentive to recruit them to fight for it. An Orient-news.net report based on regional and Western intelligence sources stated that Iran, in collaboration with Syrian security apparatuses and Shi'ite clerics in Syria, was working to spread the Shi'a in the Deir Al-Zor region, using economic grants and provision of material needs.^[8] The website also reported that "those who became Shi'ites" in the city of Al-Suwayda, which has a Druze majority, aimed to purchase land in the city center and to build there a Husseiniyah i.e. a Shi'ite religious center, and that the Iranian Embassy in Damascus had offered 1.8 billion Syrian pounds for this purpose.^[9] Another opposition website reported that in the Al-Suwayda governorate, the regime was settling Iraqi and Lebanese Shi'ites and issuing them identity cards in Druze names.^[10] It also claimed that the regime was passing laws allowing Iraqi and Lebanese supporters to be settled in homes vacated by Syrians fleeing the battles. According to this report, the law permits regime security apparatuses to appropriate the homes of citizens who had left and to rent them out to regime supporters.^[11] It also stated that the regime was paying any Sunni who converted to the Shi'a  at least $100 a month. ^[12]

With regard to the cultural and educational Shi'ization, it was reported that at the beginning of the 2014 school year, the first high school teaching the Ja'fari school of thought, which is one of the Shi'ite schools of thought, was opened in the Syrian coastal village of Ras Al-'Ayn. The Qatari daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, which is opposed to the Assad regime, reported that when Bashar Al-Assad came to power, construction had begun on Husseiniyahs throughout Syria – "which proves that the Syrian regime is rewarding Iran for supporting it."^[13]

The opposition website Zamanalwsal.net said that the official Syrian television broadcasts in March 2014 that marked Zainab's birthday proved the regime's intent to "spread Shi'ite culture and heritage amongst the Syrians." It noted that the official channel's coverage of the occasion used "a new [pro-Shia] discourse, that is even more [pro-Shi'a] than the Shi'ite media [itself]," and added that Syrian Grand Mufti Ahmad Hassoun, an Assad supporter, had attended the celebrations.^[14] It also reported that the regime was sponsoring several Shi'ite associations and institutions, such as the Imam Al-Mahdi Boy Scouts Association that it said "brainwashed the children" and provided them with "athletic training closely resembling military training."^[15]

http://all4syria.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Syrian-Christian-political-detainees.pdf 
2015:  Like all other Syrian people, Christians faced oppression, detention and torture by the Syrian authorities, who arrest and even liquidate all opponents including peaceful protesters. Examples are numerous including the killing in Homs of young filmmaker Bassel Shehadeh and the arbitrary detention of many Christian activists, as took place in May 2011 when members and leaders of the Assyrian Democratic Organization (ADO) were arrested. Other figures with established antityranny history were also arrested, including but not limited to Michel Kilo, George Sabra, Gabriel Kourieh, Khalil Maatouk, and Jries Altali.
.....
According to the Syrian Human Rights Network, more than 250 Christians have been kidnapped by ISIL and 450 (including 28 women) detained by the Syrian authorities.
....
On Friday, May 20, 2011, immediately after the end of a peaceful demonstration against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Qamishli, thirteen members (including four leaders) of the Assyrian Democratic Organization (ADO) were arrested at the organization headquarters and detained in the criminal security branch in Hasaka.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11518232/In-Syrias-war-Alawites-pay-heavy-price-for-loyalty-to-Bashar-al-Assad.html
7 April 2015: A report by the opposition Syrian Network for Human Rights published at the end of last year found that pro-government fighting groups have suffered the greatest proportion of casualties , with over 22,000 soldiers and militiamen killed in 2014 alone.
A disproportionate number of those are Alawites: "In battles with Sunni armed groups, the government doesn't trust their Sunni soldiers not to defect," said one Alawite resident, a former soldier, who asked not to be named. "So the Alawites are sent forward."
The loss of life is causing a quiet rebellion among many in the sect: vilified by the increasingly extremist rebel opposition, most still feel they have little choice but to remain wedded to the regime. But it is an alliance tinged with hatred.
A female resident in Latakia city, also speaking anonymously, said: "Mothers are caring for their children more than for Bashar, and have started trying to hide them away."


http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-12/syria-forces-repel-is-attack-on-airport-monitor/6386288
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-aleppo-idUSKBN0N208Y20150411
April 11, 2015: Syria's Grand Mufti Ahmed Badr al-Din al-Hassoun, speaking on state TV, urged the complete destruction of insurgent-held areas from which shells were being fired.
"We inform the civilians there, be they supporters (of the insurgents), or not, to leave the area. Every area from which a shell is fired, should be completely destroyed," he said.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2015/0826/In-Syria-border-town-battle-intensifies-after-mistrust-sinks-cease-fire 

August 26, 2015: The broader deal Iran sought was to transfer the Sunni population of Zabadani to rebel-held areas in exchange for the removal of Shiites of Fouaa and Kefraya from their homes to settle into regime-controlled areas around Damascus. For Iran and the Assad regime, such an arrangement would strengthen the Damascus government’s control over the key terrain linking the Syrian capital with the Mediterranean coast, the heartland of the Alawite community, a Shiite splinter sect to which Assad belongs.

But the cease-fire broke down after three days, reportedly when Ahrar ash-Sham and other factions rejected the sectarian population transfers and the Syrian regime refused a rebel demand for the release of 40,000 detainees.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng59y3zW-GE
Oct 2, 2015: Hadeel Oueis, a Syrian Christian girl from Hasaka, sends a message to the Russian church which supported the Russian aggression and named it as "Holy War".

"...there's nothing "just" and "holy" in supporting a criminal like Assad!..."



http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/shia-jihad-and-death-syria-s-army-1508759016

Nov 18, 2015: Instances were recorded this year when Iraqi and Lebanese Shia militia entered the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, hung Shia flags on the wall, and began chants considered by Sunnis to be blasphemous.

Similarly when Hezbollah took over the town of Al Qusair, between Homs and the Lebanese border, a video was released showing Hezbollah fighters hanging a large flag from the minaret of the main Sunni mosque in the city which reads “Oh Hussein.”

Recently an Iraqi Shia militia group occupied a mosque in Tal al-A’is, southern Aleppo, andpublished pictures on their website.

Abu Salah Al Shami, leader of the FSA’s Saif Al Sham, commented on this practice saying what his fighters witness on the ground: “Often these militia try to occupy and control the religious symbols in the Sunni community to achieve not just a territorial victory but a sectarian one as well.”

These forces have been repeatedly accused of human rights atrocities, many of which are said to have had a sectarian character. Fighting alongside Hezbollah, Khaled said he witnessed crimes committed by these forces, including the rape and execution of civilians in the town of Deir al-Adas after Assad’s forces took over in February 2015.

Rights group the Syrian Network for Human Rights has issued a series of reports on the human rights abuses committed by these militias, including massacres described as ethnic cleansing. In one report they document a series of sectarian massacres between March 2011 and January 2014 that left 962 civilians dead.

http://www.orient-news.net/en/news_show/96969/0/Syrian-Christian-tortured-to-death-in-Assad-detention-center
Dec 13, 2015: Simon Fareed Yaaqoub, a Syrian Christian from the city of al-Suqaylabiyah in Hama countryside was tortured to death in Assad detention centers, Syrian Network For Human Rights (SHNR) said.

Simon, 36 years old, was arrested by Assad militias at a checkpoint on Damascus Road (which connects Hamah to Damascus) while he was heading to undergo a surgical operation at a hospital in Damascus on November 26, SHNR added. 

Assad forces delivered the body to Yaaqoub's family after he was killed due to severe torture on December 10.Since March 2011, SHNR has recorded approximately twelve thousands victims of death by torture in Syria.


https://en.zamanalwsl.net/news/15385.html
22 April 2016:  Homs: Baroha village suffers sectarian cleansing by Alawite militias


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3568751/Aleppo-exterminated-says-Assad-s-cleric-issues-fatwa-against-civilians-eastern-parts-rebel-held-city.html
2 May2016: The fatwa was passed by the tyrant’s top Sunni cleric, Ahmad Badr al-Hassoun, against ordinary Syrians living in the eastern parts of Aleppo which is under the control of opposition forces.  He said: ‘I call upon the Syrian Army to show us its rage and I also call upon our leader to show us their rage in exterminating those criminals.’



http://www.memri.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/5467.htm
http://www.memri.org/clip_transcript/en/5467.htm

6 May 2016: In a Friday sermon delivered at the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, Sheikh Muhammad Ma'moun Rahma said that "treachery is one of the characteristics of the Jews" and warned that according to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Jews were trying to control the global news agencies in order to control "global ideology." Their goal, he said, was "to uproot Islam and bring ruin upon its followers." The sermon was delivered on May 6 and was broadcast on the Syrian Sama TV channel.

Following are excerpts
Sheikh Muhammad Ma'moun Rahma: Treachery is one of the characteristics of the Jews, just as slyness is one of the characteristics of foxes. The Jews dream of ruling the world from their false "Temple."

[…]

Are you aware, oh Muslims and Arabs, that global Jewry holds the political reins in the world's superpowers? The entire world knows that the Jews control the sources of knowledge and fortune, in order to take hold of the reins of culture and economy. In America and in Europe, they are now the kings of finance, the leaders of the media, and the owners of the publishing houses. They are behind many of the ideological and political movements in the East and West. Oh Muslims and Arabs, listen to what The Protocols of the Elders of Zion tells us. They said: "We must get our hands on the global news agencies, because the press and the media are the means to control global ideology. That way, people will only see the news from the point of view we choose." Their goal is to uproot Islam and bring ruin upon its followers.


http://syriadirect.org/news/airstrike-destroys-only-church-in-idlib-city-where-christians-once-%E2%80%98happily-coexisted%E2%80%99/

August 11, 2016: A reportedly Russian-fired missile severely damaged Idlib city’s only church on Wednesday, one of the last remaining vestiges of a once-thriving community where Christians “happily coexisted.”

The airstrike collapsed the outside wall of the nineteenth-century Church of the Virgin Mary, once a cornerstone of the Idlib city Christian quarter, while destroying the marble iconostasis—a wall of icons and religious paintings unique to eastern Orthodox churches—in the church interior.

....

Idlib’s Christian community largely fled en masse in the early days of the war; however, in 2015, a second wave of emigration occurred when the Victory Army—a rebel alliance led by Jaish Fatah a-Sham (formerly the Al-Qaeda-affiliate Jabhat a-Nusra) and Ahrar a-Sham—entered the provincial capital.

While some contend that Christians fled as hardline Islamist groups gained ground, others point to the Assad regime’s attempts to deliberately stoke religious tensions.

“When the Victory Army entered Idlib, the regime told us that the rebels would slaughter us,” Wael Ahmed, a Christian and former member of the Red Crescent told Syria Direct on Thursday.

“They fanned the flames of fear among the Christian community,” he added.

http://english.dohainstitute.org/release/b8f4f88b-94d3-45a0-b78e-8adad3871daa
Why have Syrian officers sided with Bashar's regime? The officer corps has been dominated by the Alawites at least since 1955, when they began to control the military section of the Ba'ath Party. As the uprising began, the question of regime-loyalty essentially came down to sectarian affiliation. Roughly four-fifth of the officer corps as well as the commanders of the numerous intelligence agencies are Alawites. Although the Alawite sect does not staff the entire officer corps, Alawites hold virtually all sensitive and important positions in the armed forces. For instance, while most Syrian air force pilots were Sunni, the air defense force that controlled logistics and communication was mainly Alawite, preventing the pilots from making a play for power. There are nearly a dozen paramilitary forces in the country, all of them are led by Assad-family confidants and consist of highly-motivated fighters loyal to the regime. Bashar's brother, Maher, a brigadier general, is the commander of the Republican Guard as well as the army's elite Fourth Armored Division; these two special units along with Syria's secret police form the core of the country's security forces. His brother-in-law, Asaf Shawkat, was the head of Military Intelligence and later a deputy minister of defense. (He died, along with the defense minister and several top defense officials, in a bomb attack in July 2012.)
The Syrian military at the beginning of the civil war numbered approximately 300,000: perhaps two-thirds of these were draftees, a large proportion of whom was drawn from the majority Sunni community. With the onset of the civil war, Sunni conscripts-repelled by the level of violence their Alawite officers were willing to inflict on protesters-started to defect and were joined by some Sunni civilians. In fact, the vast majority of the Free Syrian Army is made up of these soldiers and their officers, few of whom are Alawites. Many divisions that consist mainly of drafted Sunni soldiers have not been deployed to quell the uprising; instead, the regime has increasingly turned to the army's Third and Fourth divisions, special forces, and irregulars, often called shabiha, which are heavily Alawi or belong to other minorities sympathetic to the regime.


http://warontherocks.com/2016/08/assad-or-we-burn-the-country-misreading-sectarianism-and-the-regime-in-syria/ 

Since the Syrian Arab Army is one of conscription and Syria is overwhelmingly Sunni, it would of course be disproportionately populated by Sunnis. Its best-performing, best-equipped, and most dependable units are markedly Alawite-heavy, such as Suheil Al-Hasan’s “Tiger Force.” As he rightly notes, the very army he celebrates as a national institution is struggling to attract and keep manpower, and it needs to be supplemented by countless foreign Shia militiamen. If Sunnis were indeed supporting in overwhelming numbers the regime, why such desperate measures?  And while these forces are not as genocidal as ISIL, they remain brutish and abusive on a large scale.

More important than manpower or proportion of Sunnis in upper or lower ranks is the military’s internal, shadowy decision-making structure. The regime has perfected the art of coup-proofing through an intricate web of patronage within the military in which rank does not necessarily correspond to an officer’s actual authority. Defected Sunni officers, even those of a senior rank, complain that their career progression was all too often confined to service or logistical units, while command of elite combat units was more often than not an all-Alawite affair. They also complain of the way that their aide-de-camps were usually Alawites who reported their every movement to Military Intelligence and for that reason were often more influential than the officers themselves. Yet, it remains true that many Sunni officers remained loyal to the regime (a brilliant analysis by Kheder Khaddour explains why) but most still have to watch their back. When Hafez Al-Assad was challenged by his brother Rifaat in 1984, his Sunni military and political aides stayed loyal. When I asked Assad officials in the previous decade about this episode, the answer was startling: These aides were individually too weak to mount a challenge but together could counter one for some time. Importantly, they could not shift loyalties. Their power, position, and even lives depended on Assad himself. Many of them were stuck and would have been dispensed with under Rifaat. Senior Sunni officers (which the author helpfully lists) are hired, promoted, and kept around as individuals. Their success has little to no impact on their broader community or clan.

......

The fact that most Syrians (including Sunnis) flee to regime-controlled areas is of course notable. The unnamed author puts a great deal of weight on this. Some are certainly regime loyalists or are escaping rebel or jihadi rule. But here are key considerations for internally displaced people: Barrel bombs and missiles rain on rebel-held areas, making local governance and provision of services impossible, but not in regime-held areas, where international organizations and NGOs provide humanitarian assistance that the regime does not allow to flow into rebel-held and besieged areas. And what about the five million mostly Sunni refugees?

http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/syria-druze-sweida-1534888183 

August 22, 2016: In September, Sheikh Wahid al-Balous, the head of a Druze militia considering itself independent from both Assad and the opposition, appeared in a video angrily defending the Druze right to bear arms to protect their community.

The dispute was part of a long-term disagreement between Sweida and Damascus about Druze self-protection.

Soon after, Balous died in a car bomb explosion. Many suspected the government’s mukhabaraat spy service was responsible. Protests broke out.

....

A small number of Druze from Sweida later joined the armed opposition, including some fighting for a brigade named in honour of Atrash, who were later captured and punished by the Nusra Front. But the majority in Sweida have remained with the government, or silent.

Wael, a doctor in one of Sweida’s public hospitals, blames a "change in psyche" caused by the war and the socio-economic malaise that came with it. He did not mention the government.

http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/9412.htm
August 25, 2016: On June 4, 2016, Alawite officer 'Alaa Makhlouf, a bodyguard of President Bashar Al-Assad's wife Asma, was assassinated after a bomb was placed in his car. A group called the Free Alawite Movement claimed responsibility for the act, thus becoming the first Alawite group to openly undertake military action against regime forces.

An examination of its social media pages indicates that the Free Alawite Movement, led by Sheikh Mohsen Al-Haidari, was founded in February 2016 to combat the Assad regime and defend the Alawite sect from it. The movement operates on three levels – political, informational, and military; its military activity is carried out by its armed wing, the Free Alawite Brigade. The movement openly advertises its activity in and out of Syria and expresses its desire to cooperate with other Syrian rebel groups and opposition factions. Statements issued by the movement indicated that its founders' opposition to the Assad regime is also the result of years-long rivalries between various factions within the Alawite sect,[1] specifically between the Kalaziya faction – the majority faction that includes the Al-Assad, Makhlouf, Shalish, and Kheirbek families – and the Haidariya and Makhousiya factions, and possibly others as well.[2] The movement stresses that the regime is not as tied to the Alawite sect as it claims but rather harms the sect, and that many Alawites do not support it. 


http://warontherocks.com/2016/09/myth-making-and-sectarian-secularists-in-the-middle-east/

I do think there are useful similarities between the two autocratic systems that are worth exploring. One of Egypt’s defining characteristics was its ability to portray itself in whatever guise was most convenient: Arab nationalist, secular, religious, traditionalist, or modern. This wasn’t a case of a country with many facets but the calculation of a cynical governing elite. For example, a TV anchorwoman might be sacked for wearing a headscarf, while the authorities organize sexual assaults against largely secular, female activists demonstrating for a more democratic government.

The brazen nature of the regime’s complicity in the 2005 “Black Wednesday” sexual assaults was particularly shocking. I was covering the demonstrations that day and saw uniformed senior policemen deploy violent criminals rounded up from jail cells against defenseless women. The police even ordered their men to block escape routes. Sometimes they physically restrained the women until the thugs could reach them. Commentators at the time put the regime’s behavior down to confidence. A senior official later told me the government believed the United States would keep its criticism muted due to its fear Egypt may step back from its role at the time as a mediator between Palestinian factions and between Palestinians and Israelis. Other less well-known incidents include arrests of gay men during raids on parties and nightclubs and their subsequent prosecution on charges of “contempt and despite of heavenly revealed religions.” Leaders from the beleaguered Egyptian human rights community said in private they saw the incident as an attempt to trap them into presenting themselves as defending homosexuality. Monitoring the local press, I would see hundreds of arrests a year of men and women, such as Manal Wahid Mana’i, across the country who seemed to run foul of the country’s supposed secular courts for nothing other than their religious beliefs.

....

To survive, the regime needed to make its narrative of its enemies, as savage religious extremists, seem credible. To stoke the sectarianism it so desperately needed, the regime resorted to massacres, mass arrests of activists, releases of violent Islamists from prison (including founding members of groups Cyrus identifies as sectarian Sunni extremists, such as Ahrar al-Sham), and avoided fighting ISIL until much after the mainstream rebels of the Free Syrian Army.

Sectarianism in Syrian Army


https://twitter.com/tobiaschneider/status/771396095326945280 
This is what the Assad security state looked like on the eve of the revolution by sectarian affiliation:

https://twitter.com/tobiaschneider/status/771397711950188545 
This trend also began way before Bashar. This table from Hanna Batatu's seminal work on the regime's sociology:


https://www.academia.edu/17481977/_Second_Class_the_Grievances_of_Sunni_Officers_in_the_Syrian_Armed_Forces_ 
The work of Nicholas Van Dam provides a detailed account on the manipulation of sectarian loyalties in the Syrian armed forces. Polarization first pitted Sunni against non-Sunni officers immediately after the 1963 Baathi-dominated coup. Following the destruction of Sunni powerbase in the military, Alawi and Druze officers contended for supremacy. The purge of Druze officers in 1966 opened the door to Alawi domination despite the intra-Alawi struggle for power between the supporters of generals Hafez al-Asad and Salah Jadid. Van Dam’s analysis probes how overlapping sectarian, regional and tribal loyalties reinforced one another and thus structured the political loyalties of officers hailing from Syria’s compact minorities(i.e. the Alawis and the Druze). 3 Along similar lines, Hana Batatu ’s work on Syria shows that out of 31 officers appointed by Hafez al-Asad to lead the Syrian armed forces between 1970 and 1997 no less than 61.3 per cent were Alawi. Batatu argues that the heightening of sectarian friction in Syria in the 1970s, on the backdrop of the escalation of the conflict between the Muslim Brothers and the Asad regime, as well as the latter’s unpopular intervention in Lebanon, increased Asad’s dependency on his kinsmen for political survival, and thus heightened the Alawi nature of his regime. 


http://warontherocks.com/2016/09/decisive-military-defections-in-syria-a-case-of-wishful-thinking/
Hafez realized that the army and intelligence services were indispensable to his survival, considering the never-ending coups and counter-coups since the country’s independence in 1946. Hence, he embarked on a shrewd policy of allocating Alawites largely from his own clan to elite units, as they would eventually occupy command positions. These units — especially the Republican Guards, 4th Division, and 11th Division — enjoy generous funding, special training, advanced weaponry, privileged status, and access to top leadership. Even lower-ranking officers in these elite units possess a de facto higher status and leverage over higher-ranking officers in ordinary units. Yet the population — particularly Sunnis — perceived the backbone of the regime as minoritarian, which would have ultimately posed serious obstacles to ensuring the loyalty and cohesion of this establishment in times of crisis. At the same time, the regime was also conscious of the country’s demography and the disproportionate inflow of rural Sunni conscripts and soldiers into the armed forces. To exude the appearance of an inclusive recruitment policy even as it kept a tight grip on these institutions, the regime deployed and transferred conscripts to away from their hometowns and far from its seat of power in Damascus to safeguard against any potential coups.
.....
Before 2011, Alawites occupied 80 percent of the commissioned officer positions, while elite units are drawn entirely from Alawite ranks. These elite commanders and units became the backbone of the Syrian regime and gained more importance since the start of the civil unrest in the country, the outcome of which is now tied to the loyalty of these Alawites and long-time loyalists.
....
Early on in the uprising, Alawite communities (especially in the coastal region, where the regime enjoys unwavering support) criticized what they considered a “lenient” response by Assad against protestors. Many demanded an escalation of repression to put an end to what the regime had convinced them was a foreign conspiracy, instead of advocating for reconciliatory measures to reach a political compromise.  ... The inability of the regime to deploy all of its army units for worries of major defections gave renewed prominence to the notorious Alawite-dominated Shabbiha from the coastal region, which are now largely part of several militias including the National Defence Forces (NDF), Al-Baath Brigades, Desert Hawks, and Al-Bostan (funded by the president’s maternal cousin Rami Makhlouf). They were very active and formidable during the Syrian Arab Amy’s presence in Lebanon since 1976, mainly involved in smuggling activities and drug trafficking. The regime had to curb their outlawed activities and influence in the 1990s by sending in military units to the coast, resulting in a fierce confrontation and their ultimate submission to the regime.



https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/NewsReports/567333-iraqi-families-moving-into-damascus-suburb-reports

Sep 6, 2016: Asharq Alawsat on Monday cited a “well-informed source” as saying that Iraqi families, “particularly from the Shiite-[populated] southern provinces” of the country are being moved to Syria to repopulate a number of areas in the war-torn country.

The source told the Saudi daily that the Iraqis were settling in Darayya and Moadamiyat al-Sham, both formerly rebel-held suburbs of the capital which were evacuated in the past two weeks following deals with regime forces encircling the towns.



http://www.wsj.com/articles/syrian-government-sieges-drive-out-sunni-population-1473809473 

Sep 13, 2016: The war’s first expulsion came in early 2012, when the government forced thousands of rebels and civilians out of the Homs neighborhood of Baba Amr after a month of scorched-earth attacks. Two years later, government forces starved out rebels in the old city of Homs.

Many of those displaced, both then and more recently, have relocated or been forced to resettle in the north of the country, where rebels have their main strongholds largely outside the government’s control.

After last month’s agreement to evacuate the population of Daraya, many evacuees went to the only remaining rebel-controlled province, Idlib, while some went to other Damascus suburbs.

Three days after the last resident left Daraya in late August, Syrian military commanders summoned opposition leaders in the neighboring Damascus suburb of Moadhamiya to a meeting, residents and local leaders said, adding they had expected the call.

Negotiators from the town, which has been besieged for nearly four years, said the regime urged them threatened them, saying they had to comply with new demands, including surrendering all weapons, or face dire consequences.

Two military officers from Russia—the Syrian government’s closest international ally—attended the meeting, according to town negotiators in attendance.

“They said if we reject their conditions, they are going to burn Moadhamiya over the heads of the residents,” one member of opposition-controlled town council said.

Rebels and local leaders in Waer, the last neighborhood under opposition control in the central city of Homs, said they faced similar demands from the regime recently.

“There is clearly a strategy at the moment to move from Daraya to al-Waer to Moadhamiya in a similar pattern,” U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura said at a recently.

Asked to comment on the accusations of deliberate partitioning, Syrian presidential adviser Bouthaina Shaaban referred to an interview with state media in which she called the deals reached in Daraya and Moadhamiya “local reconciliations.”

Ms. Shaaban rejected claims that the deals were part of a broader demographic or geographic division of Syria.

In Waer, rebels and local leaders said the government’s demands that rebel fighters leave were quickly followed by shelling, including attacks with incendiary weapons on the neighborhood of 75,000 people. The two sides struck an uneasy temporary truce this month that calls for 300 rebels to leave after the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha, which began on Monday.

The provincial governor, Mr. Barazi, said rebel fighters could stay in Waer if they give up their weapons. But one resident said the government’s ultimate goal was to completely empty Waer. Similar fears reign in Moadhamiya, where many said they didn’t have enough leverage to prevent the regime’s attempts to carve out new demographic lines in Syria.

The regime’s heightened pace in striking these deals may be grounded in its desire to get the upper hand in the wake of the Turkish intervention in northern Syria and before the U.S. election, when a new administration could pursue a more interventionist policy, said Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma.

“Even though the regime has not articulated a policy of ethnic cleansing, what is unfolding is a policy of ethnic cleansing,” Mr. Landis said, clarifying that the divisions are actually on sectarian rather than ethnic grounds.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/16/mourning-the-syria-that-might-have-been/
Sep 16, 2016: Today, five years later, it’s easy to forget that Syria’s revolution started off amid the optimism of the Arab Spring. The first protests against Assad’s dictatorship were peaceful: Demonstrators were demanding democracy, not rule by Al Qaeda.
And Daraya was one of the birthplaces of this movement. In the revolution’s early stages it was the home of the activist Ghiyath Matar, known as “Little Gandhi” for his quixotic embrace of non-violence. When Assad’s soldiers arrived to crush local protests, he greeted them with flowers and water. They responded by torturing him to death. His corpse was later returned to his family with its throat torn out. The country’s downward spiral began.
In The Morning They Came for Us, her bloodcurdling account of the early stages of the war, journalist Janine di Giovanni explains what happened next. When she visited Daraya in 2012, locals gave her detailed accounts of a massacre conducted by government troops who had briefly managed to wrest the town away from the rebels. “It was punished,” she told me, “because it was a symbol of peaceful resistance.”
Yet even amid the descending darkness, the people of the city tried to hold on to their ideals. When Assad’s generals realized they couldn’t take the place back, they placed it under siege. Hunger became the government’s most potent weapon. “‘What did you eat today?’ I’d ask them,” di Giovanni recalls. “‘Grape leaves, some salt.’ They took leaves from the trees and made soup out of them.” Much of the population left, but several thousand locals, many of them activists, remained. In October 2012 they set up a council to govern themselves, and in the years that followed, even as life became nearly impossible, they persisted in holding regular elections — “every six months, inside every single office and department of the local government,” says Hussam Ayash, a spokesperson for the local council.
Most importantly of all, he told me, the local government persisted in maintaining its independence from the city’s militia, a non-jihadist unit of the rebel Free Syrian Army. In many other rebel-controlled parts of Syria, Ayash explained, local governments have frequently fallen under the sway of fighters, many of them Islamist extremists. By contrast, Al Qaeda and its ilk never managed to get a foothold in Daraya. “We had no services,” says Ayash. “We had no communications. We had no water. But also nobody could get in or get out. The only fighters in Daraya were the local people. So we had no jihadists.”
It’s hard to overestimate the psychological impact of the city’s fall. Fadi Mohammed, another Daraya activist, told me that the city embodied the hopes of the many Syrians who reject extremists of all stripes. He cites one occasion, early on, when protesters formed a human chain around the local government building to protect it from attack by pro-government forces, and recalls the city’s devotion to the principle of civilian control. “If the experience in Daraya had been protected and supported by the international community, it could have been a model,” he says. “Many people around Syria regarded Daraya as something special.” That’s a big “if,” of course. But it’s hard to dismiss the thought out of hand.

Ayash spoke to me on Skype from northern Syria, where he is now living after being “evacuated” from Daraya by government forces in the days following the city’s surrender on August 25. When the Syrian army managed to capture a key position on the outskirts of the city, Daraya’s leaders saw the writing on the wall, and accepted a government offer of safe passage to the north in return for their surrender of control over the community. This uncharacteristically lenient gesture by Assad was a shrewd move, one that enabled him to finally seize control of a key rebel stronghold at relatively low cost to his own troops. It was also calculated to undermine the resolve of rebel holdouts in other hard-pressed areas, who may now see a deal with the government as a more palatable option than continued resistance.

“The loss of Darayya is a watershed in Syria’s war,” wrote analyst Sam Heller of The Century Foundation in a recent blogpost. “For many in Syria’s opposition, Darayya represented the best of the Syrian revolution — a bastion of civil activism and nationalist, ‘Free Syrian Army’ rebels that held together and persevered for years against overwhelming odds, even as rebel-held areas elsewhere slid sideways into jihadism and factional infighting.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/syrian-rebels-caution-civilians-aleppo-offensive-100223882.html
23 Oct 2016:
Meanwhile in Lebanon, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah cast the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar Assad as a facade designed to weaken Iran's regional access and make "changes to the map", vowing to stay in the country until it could "defeat the apostate project."