A Christian persecution analyst is urging caution over reports of the number of Christians killed in violence in Syria at the weekend.
More than a thousand people are believed to have been killed in violent clashes which erupted on Thursday, although it’s unclear how many of them are Christians.
Syria's new leader Ahmed al Sharaa, has vowed to hunt down the perpetrators of the fighting between loyalists of deposed President Bashar al-Assad and the country's new Islamist rulers.
Dr Martin Parsons who is CEO of The Lindisfarne Centre for the Study of Christian Persecution told Premier Christian News “There is now an armed insurgency in the coastal region that is dominated by Alawites that was the Assad heartland. There were also Christians living there. There was fighting between government fighters and this insurgency, which is led by a former Brigadier in Assad's forces and large numbers of Alawites and Christians fled. We also know that there were targeted attacks on civilians.”
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 745 civilians have been killed, mostly in shootings, with additional deaths among security forces and militants.
Some press reports are implying Christians have been deliberately targeted and massacred in large numbers, but Dr Parsons advises caution until accurate numbers can be verified:
“The Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Damascus said on Saturday in a sermon that some of those killed included Christians but that's the most detail that we've actually got at the moment. We need to be very cautious because all we know is that there appear to have been some Christians killed. We don't know why they were killed. Were they caught up in it? Were they killed because they were Assad loyalists, or was it a question of them being targeted because of their religion, or both? We just don't know at the moment.”
80 per cent of Syria’s Christian population has left the country since 2011 and Dr Parsons said life is getting more challenging for Christians under the new leadership:
“While we can't verify any of those reports that are circulating to be targeted in very large numbers, there is a definite, very big squeeze going on that's making life very uncomfortable for Christians and they are very fearful for the future.
“The biggest threat to the Assad regime was the Islamists. That meant that Christians were fairly safe under that regime. They were given a lot of toleration, providing they didn't cross certain boundaries, they didn't criticize the regime and so forth, and so many of them actually had government jobs because of that. What we were seeing over the last few days was definitely a retaliation against those who had been involved in the past government and so it particularly focused on Alawites, but Christians were caught up in it as well.”