Don't look away as Islamist regime in Syria allows slaughter of ​​Christians and Druze

Religious minorities in Syria face persecution under the new Islamist government, highlighting the critical importance of religious liberty as the foundation for all other freedoms

Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser is the president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix, Ariz.. He is a former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander and author of A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Patriot’s Fight to Save his Faith. He was a U.S. Senate appointee to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom from 2012-16. He co-founded the Muslim Reform Movement and CLARITy Coalition, challenging Islamists and advocating for an Islam of moderation. He can be reached on X @DrZuhdiJasser

As a Syrian-American, my heart aches for what has become of my ancestral homeland. As a physician, I cannot detach myself from the human suffering behind each headline. And as someone who has spent decades warning of the rising threat of Islamism, I am sounding the alarm: a new tyranny is taking root in Syria, cloaked in religious language, but every bit as dangerous and destructive as the last. The importance of exposing, understanding and confronting early inflection points in Syria towards yet another tyranny after over 55 years of Ba’athist military dictatorship cannot be overstated.

The world has grown tragically used to Syrian suffering. Since the Assad regime began its campaign of terror in 2011, against the long-overdue revolution of anti-government protests, the country has become synonymous with war, displacement and loss. More than half a million people have been killed. Over 13 million have been displaced. Cities, like my ancestral hometown of Aleppo, have been reduced to rubble. And yet, from the ashes of Bashar al-Assad’s family reign, a new authoritarianism is emerging, this time driven not by secular fascism, but by religious supremacism.