The rapid overthrow of Syria’s dictatorial president Bashar al-Assad has sent the region into a struggle to fill power vacuums. President Joe Biden unleashed dozens of airstrikes against strategic targets in an effort to keep ISIS from taking advantage of the absence of a balance of power.
This is an appropriate concern and response. Just as important, however, is ensuring that whatever force assumes power is committed to granting religious liberty and to ending discrimination and violence against religious minorities.
This is a fundamental ingredient for lasting peace in any region, and especially in a place as volatile as Syria. It needs to be a top priority for the United States.
The best way to implement this is through a democratically elected, republican form of government, with a constitution that guarantees basic human rights.
In its 2024 report, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom described religious freedom conditions in Syria, before the recent regime change, as “poor.” It blamed the rebel group that toppled Assad, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, as well as other Syrian Islamist opposition groups supported by Turkey, as “the primary drivers of severe religious freedom violations in Syria.”
HTS leaders have recently made statements to the effect of wanting to recognize the rights of minorities and to refrain from revenge killings. “No one has the right to erase another group,” Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the militant leader of HTS, told CNN last Friday. “These sects have coexisted in this region for hundreds of years, and no one has the right to eliminate them.”
Such statements are being treated with a healthy skepticism, especially in light of reports that HTS recently tortured and abused dissidents in Idlib.
Syria’s constitution requires the president to be Muslim. The constitution also allows for the respect and protection of differing religious traditions, while allowing the government a “wide latitude to limit religious rituals if they appear to ‘prejudice public order,’” the commission report said.
Using this power, the government has previously banned Jehovah’s Witnesses and outlawed conversions from Islam to any other religion. Members of the Yazidi religion have been particularly persecuted. ISIS members kidnapped thousands of Yazidi women and girls from Iraq in 2014, and many of them are presumed to be held in parts of Syria, either in detention camps or in ISIS enclaves.
ABC News quoted Thomas S. Warrick — a former deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism policy in the Department of Homeland Security — saying the type of change necessary “will not happen spontaneously, without outside help and support. Postwar planning for Syria needs to go into high gear.”
This is true, and that planning ought to involve both the Biden administration and the incoming Trump administration. As Biden himself said in the hours following the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime: “It’s a moment of historic opportunity.”
Certainly the United States should avoid entanglement in a prolonged civil war, but the establishment of a free and democratic republic in Syria would be a major strategic victory for U.S. national security.
More than that, however, the guarantee of religious liberty would enable a fundamental human right for millions of people. If properly recognized and enforced by law, it would make it possible for people of divergent faith traditions to coexist peacefully without having to compromise their core values.
This is a fundamental reason why the United States, with its multitude of diverse religious adherents, has been able to prosper and thrive under relatively peaceful conditions for centuries. The constitutional guarantee of religious liberty, including the free exercise of religion, has fostered a tradition of tolerance that has made the United States a beacon to the world.
The United States and its allies should do what they can to promote such conditions in Syria. The region has wallowed in warfare and persecution far too long.