USCIRF says Syria’s AANES “conductive to religious freedom”
QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – In its annual report on the religious freedom conditions around the world, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) said on May 1, that areas held by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) are “more conducive to religious freedom” than those of the Syrian government and the opposition.
The report said, “The Kurdish-initiated, ethnically diverse, and multi-confessional administration [AANES] continued to support pluralistic initiatives.”
It stressed that religious freedom in Syria in 2022 “remained poor” while the state of stabilization for religious minorities in northeast Syria “contrasted favorably with the violence and displacement advanced” by Turkish-backed Syrian opposition factions, aka as the Syrian National Army (SNA), and the Turkish forces.
“Northeast Syria has the best religious conditions in the Middle East,” Former chair of the US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) Nadine Maenza, said in May, 2022.
“They built the government where they have these remarkable conditions and accept of tolerance. So it’s really the rest of the world can learn from,” she noted.
The USCIRF noted that in the government’s areas of control “egregious human rights abuses,” including arbitrary detention, torture, and enforced disappearance have continued as the “regime” makes use of “the conflict-fueled sectarianism” by trying to establish “appropriating Sunni Muslims’ religious authority.”
By this Alawis’ fear grows bigger that Sunnis, who make over 74 percent of the population, will gain power in Syria.
Muslims in Syria are estimated at 87 percent of the almost 21.5 million-person population, of which 74 percent is Sunni Muslims, 13 percent is Shi’a, Alawites, and Ismaili Muslims, and 10 percent represents Syriac-Assyrians, Maronites, Armenians, and other, according to the report.
The number of Christians, who experienced “political disenfranchisement” as well as violent attacks, has shrunk from 1.5 million before 2011 when the Syrian war started to only 300,000 in 2022.
In the opposition-held areas Christians are at risk of “extinction” due to the Turkish-backed SNA and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, formerly al-Nusra Front) practices such as displacement, harassment, and attacks.
The report said that the HTS, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the US, in Idlib Governorate and Aleppo countryside, northwestern Syria, “advanced a Salafi-Jihadist ideology disenfranchising Christians and Druze.”
“It restricted religious rituals, arrested and detained religious minorities and nonconforming Sunni Muslims, and imposed religiously justified dress codes on women,” read the report.
Speaking of the Druze minority in Syria that represents three percent of the Syrian population, it has avoided confronting the Syrian government during years of war; however, Druze people in the southern governorate of Suwayda were suppressed by the government over staging protests against the government, expressing their resentment.
The report went further revealing that between January and August in 2022 at least 53 people of the Druze community in the opposition-held areas, “which have proven even more inhospitable to Druze,” were kidnapped, 23 were kidnapped by HTS, 16 by the Islamic State (ISIS), and 14 by other Islamist organizations.
Yet, the Syrian government, the Turkish-backed SNA factions, and ISIS continued their “legal discrimination” towards the Yazidis.
The USCIRF report said that government has obscured them and classified them as Muslims.
Meanwhile, the SNA factions in the Turkish-occupied areas in north and east Syria raped, assassinated, kidnapped, seized properties, and desecrated cemeteries and places of worship of the Yazidis.
During a decade, Yazidis in Syria have been subjected to violations, described as “massive”, by Turkish forces and SNA factions in northern Syria, on September 4, Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ), and Hevdesti/Synergy, with support from Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation said in a joint report.
They were deprived of protection measures and subjected to inhuman treatment and other violations of international and humanitarian law by the armed factions, according to the report.
In 2014, ISIS attacked the Yazidi village of Taliliya in the countryside of Hasakah. ISIS sees the Yazidi community as “infidel” and their religious rituals as “distortion”.
The USCIRF revealed that in 2022, at least 2,763 Yazidi women and girls kidnapped from Iraq were still missing, many potentially hidden within northeast Syrian camps detaining ISIS fighters and their families.
Additionally, Turkey, which backed the SNA factions, and Iran and Russia, which backed the Syrian government to suppress his own people, contributed to the devastation and displacement of endangered religious minority communities in Syria via direct military actions such as airstrikes, drones, and bombings, according to the report.
The USCIRF recommended that religious freedom in areas of northeast Syria is supported, General License No. 22 is fully implemented in the AANES-held areas, as well as, including the latter in any US-backed political solution for Syria.
Among the recommendation also was “assisting the efforts of local partners to ascertain the whereabouts of kidnapped and missing Yazidi women and girls.”
It also called for designating Syria as a “country of particular concern,” and the HTS as an “entity of particular concern,” for “engaging in systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom.”