When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul re-converted into a mosque in 2020, the Christians of Suqaylabiyah, a Greek Orthodox town in neighbouring Syria, made a defiant reply: they built their own church in its name.
With architecture inspired by the grand basilica, a new Hagia Sophia rose on Syrian soil – communicating the continuity and hope of the region’s indigenous Christians.
Such a statement was courageous, even before the December 2024 collapse of Syria’s six-decade secular Baathist dictatorship.
Throughout most of the Syrian conflict, this Christian town in the central province of Hama had lived on the edge of the front line with Islamist opposition factions.
On the day of the small Hagia Sophia’s consecration in July 2022, militants in the neighbouring Sunni Muslim town of Qalaat al-Mudiq fired mortars into the gathered assembly.
The attack killed 27-year-old resident Hisham Elias and wounded more than a dozen others.
“Our children in Suqaylabiyah are paying the price for their faith with blood. What happened in Suqaylabiyah this morning is a cheap and reprehensible terrorist act,” the Damascus-based Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch John X said at the time.
A video published by the Patriarchate of Antioch shows the moment of the attack, which turned the consecration into pandemonium.
“Since the start of the revolution in early 2011, Suqaylabiyah has endured much and resisted greatly,” a woman living in the town told CSI when reached for comment last week. She declined to give her name for security reasons.
She shared photos she had taken of the church. One showed the golden-domed church, with a cross towering to be seen from afar. Another photo showed the smoldering spot where one of the mortars fired at the consecration landed.
It was a deadly message and a precursor of what was to come.
Syria’s new security forces – ‘all one color’
When the Assad regime collapsed in December 2024, so did decades of enforced social cohesion.
The new leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, had for the past decade overseen an Islamist fighting force (Syria’s former Al-Qaeda affiliate) that held sway over swathes of northwest Syria stretching to the border with Turkey.
After sweeping into the capital, Sharaa made early gestures aimed at assuaging sensitivities of Western countries. That included public assurances that minorities would not be targeted.
He was photographed meeting with Syria’s top Christian clergy on the eve of the 2025 New Year, stating that his government saw Christians as “an essential part of Syria’s identity”.
But at the same time, he was stacking the state apparatus – and most crucially the security forces – with cadres from Syria’s Islamist factions.
Individuals notorious for wartime human rights violations and extortion were promoted to powerful roles, while soldiers, police, and state-backed paramilitaries from the old regime were given a set period to turn in their weapons.
Syria’s cabinet, parliament and security apparatus, once deliberately drawn from the depth and breadth of Syria’s religious communities, was being retired. In their place a new, largely homogeneous apparatus was taking control.
“Now it is all one color,” said a Suqaylabiyah man, now living in Europe but speaking on condition of anonymity due to concerns for his family still in the town.
That included the police of Suqaylabiyah, a force that previously included Alawites, Druze and Christians, but now, he said, is strictly drawn from the Sunni majority.
Assault on the Hagia Sophia
One of the first attacks on Christians after the fall of the Assad dynasty in Syria would be against the Hagia Sophia church in Suqaylabiyah.
“The attack on the church came three nights after the fall of the regime. The regime fell on the 8th of December, and they attacked on the 11th,” said the woman who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“They broke crosses, the picture of the Virgin Mary, and everything else was stolen. The icons, everything.”
The townspeople decided to seal the church doors with stones.
“It was not safe to go there anymore. The church is located at the entrance to the town,” she said, underscoring the danger of even movement to the town limits.
“From the moment the regime fell, the situation was tense. If you had any work to do or if you had to make a trip to an appointment, you’d return home early. Everyone was afraid,” said the woman.
A second attack on Suqaylabiyah came on 23 December 2024, when a group of armed masked men came and set the town Christmas tree on fire – directly in front of the general security building.
“Many young guys from the town tried to stop them, so that it wouldn’t burn down, but these men were armed. They were calling our guys infidels and starting to shoot near them,” she said.
Later, she recounted, they were threatened in more subtle ways, like a note left on another church in the town warning that it would be set on fire.
The attacks would not be limited to symbols of Christianity.
A pogrom, then impunity
On 28 March, two men from Qalaat al-Mudiq arrived on a motorbike and began harassing local girls.
The local Christian men kicked out the intruders.
That was all it took to prompt throngs of men on motorbikes to descend on the town and carry out an hours-long pogrom.
Vehicles were torched, shops were looted and trashed – sabotaging livelihoods in an economy hollowed out by war.
Footage from that night showed vehicles from the new government’s internal security forces present in the convoy of motorbikes, not intervening to block their movement, but rather appearing to escort them.
In a video disseminated from that night, one of the participants films the scene as he rides through the town.
He does not reveal his identity but narrates while filming a motorcade of motorbikes before and behind him, as well as two police vehicles with their lights on, going in the opposite direction of the hostile intruders, who at points fire into the air.
“These are the guys of Qalaa [al-Mudiq]! And there’s General Security! From the center of Suqaylabiyah,” he shouts.
Other videos filmed by the attackers and disseminated on social media showed them breaking into shops and smashing vehicles.
“Everything happened in front of the general security. They didn’t do a thing,” said the young man from Suqaylabiyah.
“On the contrary, they put six men from Suqaylabiyah in prison.”
They were eventually released following public outcry and international media attention.
State news agency SANA reported on 11 April that notables of the two towns had come to an agreement following government-supervised “reconciliation” sessions.
The agreement stipulated that all lawsuits over damages incurred should be dropped, and that instead, compensation should be awarded according to an assessment carried out by a government-appointed committee.
According to the townspeople interviewed, no compensation has been awarded three months on.
The way out
Now, townspeople minimise their travel out of Suqaylabiyah, and only make trips during daylight hours.
Young women from Suqaylabiyah now wear the hijab (veil) when travelling to classes at the nearest university in Hama city, to avoid harassment, according to the woman and man from the town interviewed
For young men, the situation is even more untenable, as they are often identified with the former regime and subject to detention.
“We had a National Defence Force and many of the young men from Suqaylabiyah took part,” said the man from Suqaylabiyah, referring to the network of local paramilitary groups that the overstretched Assad regime created to protect government-held towns during the war.
But after turning in their weapons through the new regime’s disarmament drive, “most of them are now outside Syria” – compelled by the threat of detention to leave the town at the mercy of the new security apparatus made up of opposition militants they once defended themselves against.
“Many young guys have been detained, and when that happens, we don’t hear from them again or know where they’ve been taken,” the woman interviewed said.
A 28-year-old man from the nearby Christian town of Kafr Bahoum, also in Hama province, told CSI that he left in June 2025 for Europe for this reason.
“There was a lot of pressure being put on Christians, because they associate us with the previous regime,” he said.
“There have been many kidnappings, ransom demands, and restaurants being shut down under the pretext of serving alcohol. Honestly, Syria was becoming another Afghanistan and that is the reason I fled.”
He told CSI the situation was so uncomfortable for his younger brother as a Christian at university, that he cut short his engineering studies during his last semester before graduation.
Fabrice Balanche, a Syria expert and professor at the University of Lyon-2 in France, says the Christian population of Syria has plummeted since the 2011 war began, dropping from 1.2 million to 200,000.
The political geographer has been carrying out research in Syria for more than three decades, and he gathered his latest figures last year during a fact-finding trip to Syria involving meetings with senior Christian clergy.
“Those who remain are mainly older people who have shops and properties, but even they are waiting for the economy to improve so they can sell their assets and join their children and grandchildren abroad,” Balanche assessed.
“Only the clergy are committed to staying,” he said.
