On 17 July 2026, Christian Solidarity International (CSI) submitted a report to the UN Human Rights Council about the crisis of arbitrary detention in Syria.
The report highlighted the continued detention of Suleiman Khalil, the Christian former mayor of Sadad. It also focused on the rise in disappearances of women from religious minorities, sometimes with the complicity of Syrian security forces.
The report was cosigned by the Institute for the Documentation of Human Rights Violations Against Religious Minorities in the Levant (IDHRV-ARMIL), an NGO which focuses on the abduction of Alawite Muslim women and girls in Syria.
CSI also submitted a joint report on the persecution of Christians in Sudan to the Human Rights Council. The other organisations who joined the report are Open Doors International (ODI), Middle East Concern (MEC), and the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA).
The reports were submitted as part of the Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR). In this programme, the human rights record of every country is reviewed once every four years, and civil society groups are invited to provide input. Both Sudan and Syria are up for review in January.
Case of Suleiman Khalil
CSI’s report on Syria states that “thousands of Syrians have been detained without trial by the Syrian Transitional Government”, including some who “have been detained on the basis of protected political activity or based in part on their religious or ethnic identity”.
The report explains how Suleiman Khalil has been held in detention for nearly 20 months, “without charge, without access to a lawyer, without the right to receive visits or communications from his family, and without information about the evidence against him, if any”.
Suleiman, 52, helped to organise the defence of the Christian town of Sadad when it was attacked by the jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra, and later by the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2015.
“This history raises the question of whether Mr. Khalil is being punished for protecting his town from attack by forces which now control the Syrian government,” the report says. Syria’s current president Ahmed al-Sharaa, who came to power in December 2024, was the founder and longtime commander of Jabhat al-Nusra, al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria.
The report also highlights the cases of:
- Batoul Alloush, a 21-year-old Alawite medical student who disappeared from her university and has since been presented to the public as having freely converted to Islam, and is being held in the home of a government official.
- Milad al-Farkh, a Christian merchant from the Valley of the Christians in Homs, who was arrested and apparently tortured to death in August-September 2025.
- George Mansour, Rabee Moussa, Boutrous al-Sheikh, and Shihab Yacoub, four Christian men who were arrested on 13 June 2026, in the town of Saydnaya.
Sudan army attacks on Nuba Mountains
On Sudan, CSI’s joint report highlights recent attacks from the Sudanese Armed Forces on the Nuba Mountains, the area where Sudan’s largest Christian population lives.
One of these attacks was a drone strike on a Christmas day procession in the Nuba Mountains. “Since the incident, church leaders have had to change all Christian events, including Sunday services, to very early in the morning or late at night to avoid violence,” the report says.
“The UPR is an opportunity to bring these human rights abuses directly to the attention of the international community,” Joel Veldkamp, CSI’s director for public advocacy commented.
“We hope that the UN member-states responsible for conducting these reviews will take these reports seriously, and fulfil their responsibility to hold the Syrian and Sudanese government accountable.”
