By Wendy Yurgo, Op-ed contributor Thursday, May 07, 2026
An armed security staff of the new Syrian government stands guard as Syrian Christians celebrate Easter for the first time after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Aleppo, Syria, on April 20, 2025. Easter is a major Christian holiday that celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, which is believed to have occurred on the third day after his crucifixion. | OMAR ALBAW/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
Syrian Christians did not march in the streets this Easter. There were no parades, no processions, no children carrying palms through ancient neighborhoods where the faith lived for 2,000 years.
Instead, in late March, Islamist militants on motorcycles rode into Suqaylabiyah, one of Syria’s oldest Christian towns, firing guns, smashing cars, and destroying storefronts while residents hid behind locked doors. In response, the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox patriarchs issued a joint statement. Easter celebrations, they said, would be “limited exclusively to prayers within the churches.”
That is what defeat looks like when it wears a liturgical calendar.
More than a year ago, I warned that Syria, the ancestral homeland of my family, was becoming a graveyard for ancient Christianity. None of this absolves the Assad regime, whose brutality devastated Syria for decades. But the fall of dictatorship did not bring freedom or pluralism for Syria’s Christians. In many parts of the country, it brought fear, intimidation, sectarian violence, and the growing reality that some of the oldest Christian communities on earth may not survive at all.
The numbers don’t lie
Fourteen months later, the numbers confirm what many in Washington refused to see. Syria recorded the largest single-year jump in Christian persecution in the history of Open Doors’ World Watch List, moving from number 18 to number 6 in a single year. Its violence score against Christians nearly maxed out, jumping from 7 to 16.1 out of a possible 16.7. Its overall persecution score reached 90 out of 100, its highest ever, and high enough to earn the designation of “extreme.”
In the previous reporting cycle, zero Syrian Christians were confirmed killed for their faith. In the 2026 report, that number rose to at least 27, with researchers warning the real number is almost certainly far higher.
And the Christian population itself continues to collapse. Only about 300,000 Christians remain in Syria today, down from between 1.5 and 2 million before the civil war began in 2011, when Christians made up roughly 10% of the population. The erasure is no longer theoretical. It is happening in real time.
They are burning the churches
This is not a figure of speech. Since Assad’s fall in December 2024, attacks on Christian life in Syria have followed a relentless progression.
Christmas 2024 brought the burning of a Christmas tree by foreign fighters. In February 2025, crosses were destroyed in a Christian cemetery in rural Homs. In April, assailants attempted to burn a church in Damascus. In May, a Christian family’s car was torched in Hama with threatening leaflets left behind. In June, a church in Homs came under gunfire.
Then came what the Washington Institute for Near East Policy described as the largest attack against Syria’s Christian community in decades.
On June 22, 2025, the Feast of All Saints of Antioch, a suicide bomber entered Mar Elias Greek Orthodox Church in Damascus during Divine Liturgy. Three 350 people were gathered in worship. The attacker opened fire, threw a grenade, and detonated an explosive vest. At least 25 people were killed and 63 wounded, among them infants and children. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch called it “the treacherous hand of evil.” Chaos and panic gripped the area for hours afterward as ambulances rushed to the scene and civil defense teams searched through the wreckage for human remains.
Three weeks later, the Greek Melkite Church of St. Michael in Sweida was set ablaze. In western Syria, authorities intercepted a vehicle carrying more than 40 pounds of explosives parked outside a Maronite church alongside flyers bearing extremist symbols. In the southern city of Safita, Christians woke to death threats posted on church doors, signed by the same terrorist group linked to the Mar Elias bombing.
One Syrian pastor whose church was attacked described the aftermath this way: “They didn’t stop at the church. They ransacked and burned our homes, shattered our windows, stole our belongings, looted our businesses. They set fire to our lives.”
Syria remains an overwhelmingly Muslim nation, with roughly 87% of the population identifying as Muslim and approximately 74% as Sunni Muslim. Most Syrian Muslims are not extremists, and many have also suffered greatly throughout Syria’s collapse. But much of the violence now terrorizing Christian communities is being carried out by Islamist factions, jihadist networks, and radicalized militants who view ancient Christian minorities not as equal citizens, but as obstacles to an Islamic state.
Hayat Tahrir al Sham did not emerge from nowhere. Its roots trace directly through Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch and the broader Salafi jihadist movement that has long viewed Christians, Alawites, Druze, and other minorities as tolerated at best and expendable at worst.
They are teaching the children to hate
What is happening to the next generation may be the most chilling development of all. Jihadist indoctrination in Syria now begins at kindergarten age. In March 2026, six-year-old girls at a school in Homs were recorded chanting during morning assembly, “Welcome to death for the sake of Allah!” Videos circulate almost daily of children marching through Damascus chanting phrases translating to “I will make myself ammunition,” chants directed specifically at Christians and Jews.
Islamist preachers use loudspeakers in Christian neighborhoods to pressure residents to convert. Graffiti calling for the massacre of Christians has appeared on church walls. Women face pressure to wear the hijab. Christian families are withdrawing children from public schools because the harassment and verbal abuse have become unbearable.
A Syrian church leader described the pressure on Christian families plainly: “It’s so hard that some families from our congregation refrained from sending their children to schools because of them being harmed by verbal abuse because they are Christians.”
Even in areas once considered relatively safe, the pressure continues to tighten.
Nothing has changed since the White House meeting
In May 2025, President Trump met with Syrian leader Ahmad al Sharaa in Riyadh and later described him as “a young, attractive guy” and “a fighter” who had “a real shot to keep Syria together.” On June 30, Trump signed an executive order revoking sanctions against Syria that had been in place since 1979. On July 7, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the revocation of Hayat Tahrir al Sham’s Foreign Terrorist Organization designation, effective July 8.
The Mar Elias bombing happened just weeks before those actions.
I am not here to relitigate foreign policy or assign partisan blame. President Trump has done more to champion religious liberty at home than any president in a generation. But the fruit does not lie. Since those meetings and policy shifts, churches have continued to burn. Christians have continued to flee. Children are still learning to hate. The patriarchs cancelled Easter in the streets.
Engagement without accountability is not diplomacy. It is permission.
The graveyard is still being dug
Syria is not the only front.
I have written about the slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, where tens of thousands were killed for their faith in a single year. I have written about the systematic erasure of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the surge of anti-Christian violence across the Sahel, the crackdown on house churches in China, and the imprisonment of believers in Eritrea and North Korea.
This is not a regional crisis. It is a global assault on Christianity unfolding across multiple continents at the same time.
But Syria is different.
Syria is not just another battlefield on a map. Damascus is where the Apostle Paul was struck blind on the road before his conversion after an encounter with the risen Christ. In the ancient villages of Maaloula, Christians still pray in Aramaic, the language of Christ Himself. Some of these churches stood centuries before Islam even existed.
That is what makes this loss so staggering. We are not watching the decline of a modern institution. We are watching some of the oldest living roots of Christianity being ripped from the earth in real time.
What is required now is not another statement of concern. It is leverage. Al Sharaa’s government wants Western recognition, investment, and legitimacy. Those are negotiating tools. Use them. Make the protection of religious minorities a condition, not an afterthought.
Support organizations like Open Doors, International Christian Concern, and Aid to the Church in Need. Pray for Syria’s patriarchs, who continue standing in the gap with courage and dignity. Pressure elected leaders to make religious freedom conditions non-negotiable in any relationship with Syria’s government.
Syrian Christians did not cancel Easter in their hearts. They never have. But a faith that can no longer be lived openly in the streets, a faith forced behind locked church doors while armed militants roam outside, is a faith under siege.
It is time the world paid attention.
Wendy M. Yurgo is an attorney, entrepreneur, and the Founder and CEO of Revere Payments, a Christian conservative fintech company serving many of the nation’s leading faith based and freedom driven organizations. She writes on faith, freedom, and public policy. Her work is rooted in light, guided by principle, and grounded in truth. Follow Wendy on Instagram @wendyyurgo and X @paymentsSHEEO.