EXCLUSIVE: Catholic priest says new Syrian regime is forcing Christians to follow Sharia law

(LifeSiteNews) — Father Peter Fuchs reports that Christians in Syria are forced to adopt Islamic practices or face punishment in an exclusive interview with LifeSiteNews.

In an interview with LifeSiteNews journalist Andreas Wailzer conducted in German, Fuchs, who heads the German wing of the organization Christian Solidarity International (CSI), detailed how Alawites are being slaughtered by Islamists and how Christians are pressured to accept Islam, living in fear they may be next in line to be killed.

According to Fuchs, who has visited Syria many times and is well connected within the country, Christians are “terrified because of … the genocidal attacks against the Alawites.”

“This also affects Christians to the core, and many Christians naturally say that what we are seeing now with the Alawites could happen to us; we just don’t know when,” he said, adding that “Christians in Syria all remember the battle cry of the Al-Nusra Front, which was founded by Al-Sharaa in 2012: ‘Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave.’”

On January 29, Ahmed al-Sharaa officially took over the country as President of Syria after the government of long-time ruler Bashar al-Assad was overthrown in December 2024. Al-Sharaa, formerly known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Joulani, founded the jihadist Al-Nusra Front in 2012 in opposition to Assad’s government. In 2017, he merged Al-Nusra with other groups to form the Islamist paramilitary organization Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and served as its leader until January 29, 2025. The U.S. State Department and international bodies officially listed Al-Sharaa as a terrorist.

While the victims of murderous Islamist attacks by Al-Sharaa’s HTS and other jihadist groups are mostly Alawites, Christians have experienced increased threats as well.

“Christian families have opened their homes to the Alawites,” Fuchs stated. “What is particularly dramatic, of course, is that everyone there is poor, including the Christians, and they cannot provide for their Alawite neighbors as they would like to.”

“So we have to imagine that many people in Syria who are in poverty only have one meal a day, if that.”

Fuchs stressed that  ”there are many types of discrimination against Christians at the moment, especially in rural areas.”

While Syria was a secular country under Assad, the new Islamic regime appears to be implementing Sharia law throughout the nation. According to Fuchs:

Girls are told they have to wear the Islamic hijab in class at school, and when the girls tell the teacher, “We’ve never done that, we’re Christians,” the teacher answers, “You can be Christians at home, here at school, you wear the hijab.”

What was previously unthinkable in Syria is now also happening in schools: the children have to recite Koran verses, including the Christian children. And if the Christian children say, “We don’t want to do that because we are Christians,” then the principal threatens to expel the children from school.

“ And then, of course, we also hear even more dramatic things,” Fuchs continued. “There are checkpoints all over the country, and we have heard that when Christians are in cars and come to these checkpoints, they are told that the jihadist fighters at the checkpoints will tell them that they are not allowed to pass until they recite the Islamic creed.”

Similarly, “young [Christian] men in Homs are threatened with being beaten up if they don’t recite the Islamic creed.”

The head of CSI Germany noted that the number of Christians in Syria has been shrinking for two decades:

Twenty years ago, there were probably over 2 million Christians living in Syria. Today, there are only estimates, but it is assumed that between 300,000 and 500,000 Christians live in Syria.

All Christians who are still in Syria see their future outside the country. This is dramatic, and Europe will also face a new wave of refugees.

The Christian minority in Syria consists mainly of Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Greek Catholic Melkites, and Syriac Catholics.

Fuchs discussed the country’s rich Christian history. In some ways, it was the birthplace of the great Christian mission into the world, with St. Paul’s famous conversion taking place before Damascus.

“The Christians in the Middle East, especially the Christians in Syria, where the disciples of Jesus were called Christians for the first time, namely in Antioch, which today is Turkey but which was actually always culturally Syrian, they also preserve our heritage.”

Fuchs reflected on how sad the exodus of Christians from this historic land is.

Jihadist killing spree against the Alawite minority

Fuchs detailed the attacks on the Muslim minority Alawites in the past weeks and months, noting that “since at least March 8, we have been seeing these genocidal acts of violence against Alawites in the coastal regions of Tartus, Latakia, Baniyas, and Jableh.”

He said that in many mosques around the country, jihad (Islamic holy war) was declared against the Alawites.

“Then not only HTS but also other jihadist groups came to this coastal area and indiscriminately killed Alawites, killed Alawite civilians, women, children.”

“I have heard from friends on the ground that at least 4,000 people have been killed,” the head of CSI Germany said. “Others are now saying that there could even be as many as 10,000 victims of these attacks.”

To cover up the crimes, the Islamist groups are “hiding corpses, quickly organizing burials in mass graves themselves, in order to conceal the extent of this ethnic cleansing from the U.N. organizations and the world public.”

Since Al-Sharaa took control of Syria, “we have seen that the Alawites in particular have been subjected to unbelievable injustices and unbelievable terror,” Fuchs told LifeSiteNews.

Since Assad himself is an Alawite, the religious group is “being blamed for everything that has happened under the Assad regime,” including the atrocities that “happened in the last few years of war.”

Fuchs stressed that the genocidal attacks against Alawites are being encouraged by the new government.

“ So when Al-Joulani, or Al-Sharaa, as he now calls himself, says that this situation is beyond his control, then that is absolute nonsense because we can see quite clearly that the current jihadist government of Syria has given the green light for this ethnic cleansing, for this genocide against Alawites.”

“And we assume, as do our partners on the ground, that within a very short time, the jihadists who are fighting with and under Al-Sharaa will settle in the Alawite houses there on the Mediterranean,” Fuchs explained, adding:

This means that the Uyghurs, the Chechens who are now fighting on the side of the jihadist regime in Damascus, will be rewarded and will settle in these Alawite areas.

And of course, the Christians also fear this, especially in the valley of the Christians between, roughly speaking, Homs and the Mediterranean, that sooner or later their communities will perhaps be driven out there too so that jihadist fighters can also settle there.