In the middle of the night on Monday, Elias, a 21-year-old Syrian Christian living in Berlin, received a voice message from his mother in Damascus. She was weeping. “If anything happens to us, do not come back to Syria,” she said. “Do not come to bury us. Do not come for this shitty piece of land, for this shitty house. Stay where you are.”
A Syrian rebel coalition led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani had taken over the capital city on Sunday. And while Syrians are collectively celebrating the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s sadistic regime, Syrian Christians are nervous about their future in the region. The Islamist rebels in Syria have a history of persecuting Syrian Christians.
Elias, who asked that we use a pseudonym to protect his family, told The Free Press that he has seen some truly horrific acts by the rebels. In 2014, when he was still a child, he went to a family friend’s house to console them after their son was kidnapped by Islamist rebels from a Christian area. While they were there, their son’s severed head was delivered in a box—his cross necklace stuffed in his mouth. They buried his head in his family’s plot in a Christian graveyard. In 2022, at a church inauguration ceremony that some of Elias’s relatives attended, a rebel drone landed in the middle of the ceremony, killing two people and injuring 12.
“I’m only 21 years old,” Elias said. “But I’ve already buried 12 friends.” Not surprisingly, he fears the worst. “We have no reason to trust al-Jolani,” he said. “He is a terrorist.”