FACTSHEET

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN SYRIA

UNITED STATES COMMISSION on

INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

732 N. Capitol Street, NW, Suite #A714

Washington, DC 20401

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 November 2022

Religious Freedom in Syria Under Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)

Syria remains fragmented 11 years after the onset of its brutal civil war, as a range 

of internal and external actors control territory in areas outside the governance of 

President Bashar al-Assad’s Ba’athist regime. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—a former 

al-Qaeda affiliate; an evolving conglomerate of militant Islamist Syrian rebel groups; 

and U.S.-designated terrorist group since 2018—continues to grow and consolidate its 

administrative power over the northwestern province of Idlib. 

Although HTS has cut formal ties with al-Qaeda, engaged in self-promotional 

interviews with international media, and attempted to rebrand itself as a legitimate 

civic authority, it remains a potent source of a Salafi-jihadism that restricts the 

religious freedom of non-conforming Sunni Muslims and threatens the property, 

safety, and existence of religious minority groups such as Alawites, Christians, and 

Druze. Further, HTS’s cultivation of a mutually and politically expedient relationship 

with Turkey—which itself represents a distinct threat to vulnerable religious minority 

groups via its military incursions in northern Syria—compounds the perilous religious 

freedom conditions in and near Idlib. 

Evolution of HTS

HTS, or Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, has undergone several name 

and purported identity changes since its origins in 2011 as Jabhat al-Nusra, originally 

a Syrian front for the Islamic State in Iraq, which at the time was itself an Iraqi affiliate 

of al-Qaeda. HTS’s successive renamings and “rebrandings” appear to echo al-Qaeda’s 

own strategy in Syria of establishing branches and presenting them as locally-grown 

organizations arising in response to Syrians’ needs. This practice is especially notable 

for purposes of evaluating HTS’s religious freedom progress: the organization’s 2016 

advertised break with al-Qaeda and a 2021 campaign to rehabilitate its militant image 

follow an established trajectory of repackaging and marketing anew the same core 

values of a Salafi-jihadism fiercely intolerant of perceived or actual dissent.

While the Assad government has regained or maintained control of approximately 

70 percent of Syria, the northwestern region, particularly the governorate of Idlib, 

constitutes a significant pocket of rebel resistance. Today, HTS is the dominant 

regime-opposed force of this sort and, via the “Salvation Government” it controls, the 

de facto administrative authority in Idlib. However, the Salvation Government’s HTSrehabilitation experiment remains in its early stages; any change in the geopolitical 

calculus of Syria could trigger HTS’s escalation of brutality. For example, if the Assad 

regime reclaims territory in the northwest, HTS’s resulting loss of “state-building” 

as a legitimate platform could prompt its return to large-scale acts of insurgency 

Nury Turkel

Chair

Abraham Cooper

Vice Chair

Commissioners

David Curry

Frederick A. Davie

Sharon Kleinbaum

Mohamed Magid 

Stephen Schneck

Eric Ueland

Frank Wolf

Erin D. Singshinsuk

Executive Director

USCIRF’s Mission

To advance international 

freedom of religion or 

belief, by independently 

assessing and unflinchingly 

confronting threats to this 

fundamental right.

www.USCIRF.gov

@USCIRF

Media@USCIRF.gov
2 USCIRF Factsheet: RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN SYRIA | NOVEMBER 2022

and terrorism, with severe consequences for religious 

freedom. Moreover, the group has accompanied its claims 

to additional territory with assertive and sometimes 

violent expressions of religious ideology. Most recently, in 

October 2022, HTS—along with its Turkish-backed Syrian 

rebel allies—advanced on the strategically important 

city of Afrin and other parts of the Aleppo governorate, 

mounting a lethal campaign against rival Turkish-backed 

militias and gaining partial control of the area. HTS 

partially withdrew its forces at Turkey’s apparent behest, 

but not before instituting stringent, religiously-justified 

dress codes on local women and reportedly invoking 

religious ideology to commit crimes such as crop theft and 

the torture and murder of a teenager.

Religious Freedom Violations

In 2021 and 2022, HTS has continued to perpetrate some 

of the same human rights abuses—including torture, 

forced disappearance, rape and other sexual violence, 

and killing in detention—that the United Nations’ 

Independent International Commission of Inquiry on 

Syria documented for the organization and its predecessors 

through 2020. Having taken over government prisons 

and established additional jails, HTS has used sectarianmotivated detention and related abduction and demands 

for ransom against members of minority groups. 

Religious minorities, including non-Sunni Muslims and 

Druze—both longstanding targets of Sunni rebel groups’ 

discrimination, harassment, and compelled Sunnism—

have converted to Sunni Islam or fled HTS territories, and 

those who remain are not represented in the official bodies 

governing the area.

Some of the organization’s human rights abuses have clear 

implications for religious freedom in Syria’s northwest. For 

example, HTS employs arbitrary detention and criminal 

prosecution for a variety of reasons, including punishing as 

“slander and blasphemy” individuals’ private conversations 

related to religious matters. In May 2021, HTS personnel 

apprehended two men praying in an Aleppo governorate 

mosque and arrested them for incorrect praying practices. 

The arrestees, who are students from the Memorizing 

the Holy Quran Institute of Mus’ab Bin Omair Mosque, 

suffered detention and suspected torture. Markaz alFalah—formerly a branch of the Hesba religious police 

and rebranded in September 2021 as a “morality police”—

enforce religiously-justified dress codes against women, 

arresting them for being “inappropriately dressed” and 

for using or participating in entertainment banned on 

religious grounds. In 2021, the Syrian Network for Human 

Rights estimated that at least 2,246 Syrian citizens were 

“still detained or forcibly disappeared” in HTS detention 

centers.

Religious minorities, too, suffer serious harm within 

HTS’s authoritarian regime. Since 2015, religious 

minorities such as Christians and Druze have lost their 

homes and land to HTS and its predecessors. Under the 

present Salvation Government, the Properties Committee 

(formerly the “Spoils of War” Committee) continues to 

misappropriate Christians’ private properties and either 

redistribute them to HTS members and their families 

or rent them to internally displaced persons for the 

Salvation Government’s profit. Evidence suggests that this 

confiscation scheme, which includes the “targeting” of 

Christians, may amount to the war crime of pillage. 

As part of a broader effort to accelerate his public relations 

campaign, HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani met

with Idlib’s Christians in July 2022, agreeing to form a 

committee to review requests by many Christian owners 

whose properties were seized and restore their confiscated 

lands, orchards, and shops. Likewise, in the summer of 

2022, the Jolani regime publicized its building of a well to 

supply water to Druze-majority villages in the northern 

Idlib area of Jabal al-Summaq. At the well’s inauguration 

in June, al-Jolani made statements distancing HTS 

from the 2015 massacre of 20 Druze residents by HTS’s 

predecessor group. 

Despite such recent overtures toward religious minorities, 

HTS forces continue to harass religious minorities and 

prevent them from the free practice of their religion, 

forbidding Christians’ ringing of church bells or holding 

some religious ceremonies. HTS’s highly sectarian 

appeal to Sunni identity continues to assert itself in both 

direct and indirect ways, including its unamended policy

requiring Druze to renounce their faith and declare 

conversion to Sunni Islam. 

Education is another sphere in which HTS’s restriction of 

religious freedom has been deeply burdensome, especially 

to women and girls. Although some observers have 

suggested that the group’s religious curriculum promotes 

slightly less “harsh interpretations” of Shari’a relative to the 

schools of other radical Islamist groups, HTS-established 

schools still leave little room for theological or ideological 

dissent from the group’s Salafi-jihadist version of Islam. 

In August 2022, for example, building upon existing 

religiously justified and compulsory sex segregation in 

schools and wider society, the Education Directorate of the 

Salvation Government gave oral instructions to teachers 
USCIRF Factsheet: RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN SYRIA | NOVEMBER 2022 3

and administrators to block married female students—

including girls subjected to forced child marriage—

from attending public schools and universities.

Political Context in the Northwest

In addition to the religious freedom violations just 

described that are definitively attributable to HTS, 

observers have identified HTS as one of a few rebel 

groups with Turkish links who may have orchestrated 

recent violent attacks on religious minorities, such as 

a July 2022 explosion that targeted a Greek Orthodox 

church inauguration in Hama—a governorate that HTS 

partially controls. 

As compared to Syrian opposition militias that receive 

direct backing from Turkey, such as factions of the 

Free Syrian Army (FSA), HTS has a more complicated 

symbiotic relationship with Turkey—a powerful military 

aggressor seeking to secure its border against Syrian 

Kurdish foes and to potentially resettle in northern Syria 

millions of displaced Syrians who are currently living 

as refugees in Turkey. Turkey has designated HTS as a 

terrorist organization, yet, perhaps in tacit exchange 

for HTS’s services as a watchdog and security force, it 

has not actively impeded the rebel group from gaining 

administrative power in Idlib in recent years. Ultimately, 

HTS’s relations with Turkey have serious ramifications 

for religious freedom, especially given the escalating 

encroachment in parts of northern Syria of Turkey’s 

military and Syrian proxies, which continue to devastate 

religious minority groups already at heightened risk 

for extinction.

Some analysis has affirmed HTS’s narrative that it has 

successfully expelled foreign fighters and kept at bay 

transnational jihadist activity in areas it controls. However, 

others have questioned whether HTS has effectively 

subdued the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 

particular, pointing to the unlikelihood that two ISIS 

leaders whom the United States killed in 2022 could have 

existed in the Idlib area without HTS’s knowledge. 

HTS’s strategy for dealing with various jihadist and rebel 

groups, both within Syria and beyond, likely poses an 

indirect threat to religious freedom for the residents in 

the northwest. If HTS fulfills its authoritarian promise of 

stamping out rival jihadist or rebel groups, its approach 

could “exacerbate radicalization” among those who 

otherwise may not have aligned ideologically with 

ISIS and al-Qaeda but “are pushed by their grievances 

and shared enmity of al-Jolani to join such groups.” 

Conversely, HTS’s weaknesses in regulating other 

radical militant groups may prove equally dangerous: 

experts have raised “questions about [HTS’s] ability 

to prevent Idlib from becoming a staging ground for 

transnational jihadists”—groups that present a proven 

threat to the safety, existence, and religious freedom of 

local populations, especially religious minorities. The 

Idlib governorate’s Druze community, for example, has 

expressed concern that HTS cannot or will not bring to 

justice foreign-origin Islamist fighters who target the 

Druze for crimes such as the potentially sectarian murder 

in August 2022 of an elderly Druze couple. 

Conclusion

Despite HTS’s concerted public relations campaign to 

rehabilitate its image, its authoritarian and ideologically 

driven governance—as well as its ever-evolving relations 

with other non-state and state actors vying for control in 

parts of Syria—puts northwest Syria’s religiously diverse 

population at continued risk. For some of these religious 

communities, challenges to freedom of religion or belief 

amount to threats to their very existence. 
732 N. Capitol Street, NW, Suite #A714

Washington, DC 20401

202-523-3240

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is an independent, bipartisan federal government entity established by the 

U.S. Congress to monitor, analyze, and report on religious freedom abroad. USCIRF makes foreign policy recommendations to the President, 

the Secretary of State, and Congress intended to deter religious persecution and promote freedom of religion and belief.

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UNITED STATES COMMISSION on INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM