{"id":51774,"date":"2026-04-04T19:21:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T19:21:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/51774\/"},"modified":"2026-04-04T19:21:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T19:21:12","slug":"how-attacks-on-a-christian-town-test-syrias-postwar-cohesion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/51774\/","title":{"rendered":"How attacks on a Christian town test Syria’s postwar cohesion"},"content":{"rendered":"

What began as an argument about allegations of harassment on the streets of Al-Suqaylabiyah, a Christian-majority town<\/a> in Syria\u2019s northwest Hama province, soon turned to violence.<\/p>\n

On Saturday, hundreds of men from the neighbouring Sunni village of Qalaat Mudiq entered the town to commit a spate of destruction targeting Christian homes<\/a>, shops, and property.<\/p>\n

A local network of civil peace activists, tipped off about the approaching mob by the Syrian security services, had warned residents to clear the streets, with no immediate reports of casualties.<\/p>\n

With the town’s local security forces failing to rein in the crowd, the looting lasted hours before security forces, sent from the nearby city of Hama, managed to expel the mob from the town.<\/p>\n

Protestors from the Christian community took to the streets on Sunday, calling for the state to deal with the issue of unregulated weapons and to protect its minority Christian community<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A number of Syrian Churches have announced that they are scaling back Palm Sunday celebrations<\/a> to only hold prayers inside their churches due to what they described as \u201cthe current discouraging circumstances.\u201d<\/p>\n

The violence is a grim reminder that Syria\u2019s latent sectarian grievances, deepened over more than a decade of war, are far from healed, more than 15 months since the fall of Bashar Al-Assad\u2019s regime.<\/p>\n

The frontline town<\/p>\n

Disputes between residents of Al-Suqaylabiyah and local Sunni villages are not new, but the town’s position on the frontline of the war has given personal conflicts the propensity to take on a darker character.<\/p>\n

Even before the war, \u201cit was frequent for there to have been small fights as these towns are local rivals,\u201d Felix Legrand, an independent researcher and consultant working on Syria, tells The New Arab.<\/p>\n

Despite this history, both communities have also had long-standing economic and social ties. The war, however, disrupted these to some extent as sectarian cleavages<\/a> were opened across the country.<\/p>\n

During the conflict, Al-Suqaylabiyah became a \u201cfrontline town that saw a local mobilisation [as part of the pro-regime National Defence Forces],\u201d explains Legrand, sandwiched between opposition-held Sunni towns and regime-controlled Christian and Alawite communities.<\/p>\n

Since the fall of Assad’s regime, Syria has witnessed a pattern of long-standing sectarian grievances rooted in war-era crimes erupting into communal violence. [Getty]<\/p>\n

The town’s local militia was implicated in the destruction and looting of neighbouring Sunni villages. However, according to Legrand, \u201cthe idea that the local community was supportive of the regime is not the political reality; in general, there was a lot of dislike for the local warlord\u201d.<\/p>\n

Since the fall of the regime, tensions have intensified as Sunni communities associated with the opposition feel empowered and angry towards those they perceive as having aligned with the former regime.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have displaced people and individuals associated with the revolution who are returning to find their homes destroyed and looted; their lands cultivated by others,\u201d explains Legrand.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhilst Al-Suqaylabiyah and the Alawite villages are completely untouched.\u201d<\/p>\n

Syria’s sectarian grievances<\/p>\n

Since the fall of Assad\u2019s regime, Syria has witnessed a pattern of long-standing sectarian grievances rooted in war-era crimes erupting into communal violence amid a weak security environment and a lack of meaningful transitional justice mechanisms<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is a pattern that has repeated numerous times, the highest profile of which were a series of massacres targeting Alawites on the coast<\/a> in March and Druze in Suweida<\/a> in July.<\/p>\n

The country continues to be plagued by simmering vigilantism, retaliatory killings, and kidnappings, occasionally marked by incidents of mob violence. In November, the murder of a Sunni couple in rural Homs triggered a tribal mobilisation that led to riots targeting the city\u2019s Alawite community, whom they blamed for the murder.<\/p>\n

This is also not the first high-profile incident in Al-Suqaylabiyah. In December 2024, during the initial weeks of the new government\u2019s rule, a Christmas tree in the town\u2019s main square was set alight by foreign fighters, triggering a number of protests<\/a> in Christian neighbourhoods across the country denouncing the infringement of their religious rites.<\/p>\n

These mutual grudges have not been properly addressed. \u201cThere is no formal channel through which grievances, from any side, are heard, investigated, or resolved,\u201d explains Nanar Hawach, a senior researcher for Syria with the International Crisis Group (ICG), to TNA.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat vacuum does not justify violence, but it adds to the conditions under which violence becomes more likely.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, Gregory Waters, an independent researcher and Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, warns against viewing these incidents solely at a macro level and instead stresses that each incident is highly context-specific and driven by local particularities.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there is a pattern [fuelling these outbreaks of violence across the country] it is a pattern of unresolved local frictions,\u201d he adds. \u201cCalls for \u2018national dialogue\u2019 won’t actually address what’s happening on the ground. [Syria] needs local dialogue between communities aimed at reducing the willingness of residents to escalate issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

Syria continues to be plagued by simmering vigilantism, retaliatory killings, and kidnappings, occasionally marked by incidents of mob violence. [Getty]<\/p>\n

Security service architecture<\/p>\n

These spates of violence are also being exacerbated by shortcomings in Syria\u2019s security situation. \u201cThese towns have had social frictions for decades without producing any comparable [violent incidents],\u201d explains Hawach. \u201cWhat has changed is the security architecture around it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Syria\u2019s mixed areas, local security forces are often drawn from one side of the communal divide and deployed to police the other. \u201cIn areas where civil war grievances remain high, [this system] often shapes whose safety is prioritised and reduces the likelihood of early intervention [in instances of violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

He says the \u201cbehavioural gap\u201d between local forces and reinforcements brought from Hama demonstrates this fact. \u201cThe former appear to largely have stood by, while the latter moved to stop the violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, for Waters, the shortcomings stem largely from the lack of manpower. \u201cThe checkpoints between these communities are normally staffed by two people. There is no reasonable expectation for two men to stop hundreds of guys from entering the town,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n

Equally, the local police force, consisting of 20 officers, was unable to control the mob. \u201cThe Ministry of Interior just doesn\u2019t currently have the resources to stop access when signs of escalation appear.\u201d<\/p>\n

With Hama a forty-five-minute drive from Al-Suqaylabiyah, Waters argues, the hour it took for reinforcements to be deployed from Hama is actually \u201cquite good.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, whilst addressing the security shortcomings might lessen the impact of such violence, it doesn\u2019t resolve the root cause of the tensions.<\/p>\n

Many communities still feel that they have not received adequate justice and compensation for the crimes committed against them during the war.<\/p>\n

Lacking any real pathway to transitional justice, many, empowered by the perception that Syria\u2019s new government is on their side, are seeking to exact that justice themselves.<\/p>\n

Until that sense of injustice is resolved, communities like Al-Suqaylabiyah may always feel in danger.<\/p>\n

Cian\u00a0Ward\u00a0is a journalist based in Damascus, covering conflict, migration, and humanitarian issues<\/p>\n

Follow him on X:\u00a0@CP__Ward<\/a><\/p>\n

Edited by Charlie Hoyle<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What began as an argument about allegations of harassment on the streets of Al-Suqaylabiyah, a Christian-majority town in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51775,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[672,7036,8243,2665,95],"class_list":{"0":"post-51774","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-syria","8":"tag-ahmed-al-sharaa","9":"tag-christians","10":"tag-hama","11":"tag-post-assad-syria","12":"tag-syria"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116348065187399485","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}