Background
On 8 December 2024, the 54-year-old Assad dictatorship collapsed, bringing an end to an era of widespread state terror and mass violence.
In its place, a government has taken power led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former member of al Qaeda whose forces committed numerous atrocities against religious minorities in Syria during the uprising against the Assad regime.
The Syrian Transitional Government has publicly committed to protecting the rights of all Syrians, regardless of ethnic or religious background. But Syria’s new security forces are largely composed of former jihadist groups or Islamist rebels drawn from Syria’s Sunni majority.
Government and government-aligned forces carried out large-scale massacres of Alawite Muslim civilians in March 2025, and Druze civilians in July 2025. After the March 2025 massacres, Christian Solidarity International issued a Genocide Warning for Syria.
This monthly update highlights known or suspected attacks against religious minorities in Syria. It is not an exhaustive listing, but rather serves as an indicator of the ongoing threats to religious minorities in the country. Attacks or revenge killings against suspected perpetrators of human rights abuses under the former regime are excluded.
Extrajudicial killings
On 7 June, unknown gunmen on motorbikes murdered four Alawite Muslim civilians and wounded six, in shooting attacks in two different villages in Hama governorate.
On 14 June, a Twelver Shi’ite man named Diaa Faraj Hamoud was shot to death in the village of al-Tamour, in Aleppo governorate.
On 28 June, a Twelver Shi’ite man named Ali Hassan al-Zaher was shot to death in Damascus by unknown gunmen.
The Syrian Justice Archive documented the additional extrajudicial killings of 12 Alawite Muslims and one Twelver Shi’ite man in June. These cases require further independent investigation.
Abductions
Religious minority women, especially Alawite Muslim women, continue to be regularly abducted, sometimes with the apparent complicity of the authorities.
Batoul Alloush, an Alawite Muslim woman who disappeared from her university dorm on 29 April and was later presented in public as having converted to Islam, remains separated from her family.
The Institute for the Documentation of Human Rights Violations Against Religious Minorities in the Levant has documented at least 131 abductions of religious minority women since December 2024, overwhelmingly Alawite.
Arbitrary detention
Sources inside Syria report that Christians who are believed to be wealthy are regularly arrested on flimsy pretexts, and released only when their families pay local officials a large ransom. One source writes: “Christian business owners are getting targeted, where the government will say: ‘Oh, we had a complaint or we have evidence that you are doing forbidden or haram things,’ and they take the people with them to prison so their families pay money to get them back.”
This practice is especially frequent in the areas of Saydnaya, a Christian holy town north of Damascus, Jaramana, a suburb of Damascus, and Wadi al-Nasara (The Valley of the Christians) in Homs governorate.
Multiple local sources have confirmed to CSI that in the Christian-majority town of Saydnaya, four men were arrested on 13 June 2026: George Mansour, Rabee Moussa, Boutrous al-Sheikh, and Shihab Yacoub. They were reportedly arrested in connection with their participation in the defense of Saydnaya when it came under rebel attack in January 2014. As of 8 July 2026, they were being held for questioning in the Ministry of Interior prison in al-Nabek.
Suleiman Khalil, the former mayor of the Syriac Orthodox town of Sadad, who organised its defense against the Islamic State in November 2015, has been detained without charge and without access to a lawyer for 17 months.
Other incidents
The entire population of the Twelver Shi’ite village of Mazar’a near Homs was displaced after local authorities razed the village to the ground in late June.
Mobs attacked Alawite neighbourhoods in Damascus on 14-16 June, after large protests over the government’s failure to arrest perpetrators of atrocities from the Assad era.
On 29 June, the shrine of Shaykh Nasser al-Hakim, an Alawite religious site in the village of al-Arida in Homs governorate, was burned.
In June, new customs regulations prohibited the import of alcohol and musical instruments, imposing Salafi norms on Syria’s entire population.
