Syria’s top Christian leader calls for protection after meeting Al Shara

Greek Orthodox Patriarch Yohanna Yazigi met President Ahmad Al Shara for first time since church bombing in June

Syrian President Ahmad Al Sharaa receives Yohanna Yazigi, Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox, at the People's Palace in Damascus. Photo: Presidency of the Syrian Arab Republic

Syria's main Christian religious figure has appealed to President Ahmad Al Shara to take practical measures to protect the sect after violence against the Druze eroded minority support for the new regime, sources said on Sunday.

Mr Al Shara met Yohanna Al Yazigi, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Syria, and "discussed the Church’s role in consolidating and boosting the bonds of citizenship and national unity", official news agency Sana reported.

Mr Yazigi has been critical of Mr Al Shara, a former member of Al Qaeda, whose Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS) ousted former president Bashar Al Assad in December.

It was the first meeting between the two since a suicide bombing killed 23 people at a church in a low-income area of Damascus in June. Mr Al Yazigi said the authorities bore responsibility for not protecting minorities and condolences sent by Mr Al Shara were not enough to assure the sect.

Government forces have since launched an offensive to capture the mostly Druze governorate of Sweida from a defiant cleric, killing hundreds of people and drawing Israeli intervention.

Maintaining Syria's hundreds of thousands of Christians is key to maintaining diplomatic ties with Washington, a process started when US President Donald Trump met Mr Al Shara in Riyadh in May.

The Patriarch told the President that promises he has made to Western powers to protect Christians "need to be translated on the ground", according to a clergyman briefed on the meeting.

"The message from the Patriarch was that the rhetoric must be matched by tactics and mechanisms to protect the Christians and integrate them in the new system," the source said.

This includes readmitting Christians into the security apparatus and stopping perceived provocation against them, such as encroachment by HTS loyalists on Christian neighbourhoods.

Since the removal of Assad family rule, new security personnel have all been drawn from the majority Sunni community. Some Christians, however, have been readmitted to administrative roles.

An 11-day HTS-led offensive at the tail end of last year has all but ended 14 years of civil war, in which many Christians and other minorities supported the Assad regime against Sunni rebels. However, sectarian attacks have continued, claiming victims from the country's Alawite minority, the bulk of whom were killed in March and more recently the Druze community of Sweida.

A Christian politician said an ongoing siege by the army and militias allied with the government on Sweida has unsettled the Christians.

"Al Shara has shown that he can be practical and back off," he said. "But he has not shown that he can contain his core constituency, which is ultimately militant, and this scares the Christians."

In 2010, a year before the uprising against Mr Al Assad, Syria had about 850,000 Christians, forming about 4.5 per cent of the population. Late in 2011, the civil war broke out, broadly pitting Mr Al Assad's Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, against the Sunni Muslim majority.