“The economic situation is very bad,” said Laila, a Sunni lawyer. “I have many skills, yet I can’t find a single job that values my qualifications.”

The currency had stabilized somewhat after years of hyperinflation, but prices continued to climb. Bread that once cost 400 Syrian pounds was selling for roughly 10 times that, and subsidies had largely disappeared. “It’s the prices that were liberalized — not the politics,” she said.

Hussain, a Kurdish government employee and writer, said the strain was worse than before. Under Assad, modest help from abroad went a long way. “If someone sent $100, we could survive the month,” he said. “Now, if they don’t send $400, it’s not enough.”

Under the former regime, Laila added, access to public-sector jobs was corrupt but at least procedural. “Now the civil service exams are canceled,” she said. “Appointments are just given,” distributed through patronage networks tied to HTS and its allies.

“Now the whole place is run by gangs,” Hussain said. He described a friend who still worked inside the government. “On paper, he makes the decisions. But the real authority belongs to the new deputies from HTS.”

Syrians had endured economic hardship for years. What felt new was the uncertainty about authority, safety, and how quickly identity could become a liability.

The new leaders brought the governing culture of Idlib — no alcohol, no music, little gender mixing. That culture now hangs over much of the country. Techno concerts and dance parties stopped, though there were no official bans. Mixed-gender outings were curtailed. In some areas, schools were no longer coeducational. Many stopped drinking outside the home, and some bars and clubs shuttered preemptively. By March 2026, Damascus authorities made it official, restricting alcohol sales to a handful of Christian neighborhoods and banning it from restaurants and bars citywide by June.

Laila already wore the hijab. “Now they want to force everyone into one way,” she said. “Before, we lived together without obsessing over what people wore. Now women are their obsession.”

She no longer stayed out late or spent nights outside the home. “They scrutinize everything now. The hijab is being monitored very strictly.”

Jannah, a lawyer from Syria’s Circassian minority who asked to use a pseudonym, said some of her Alawite friends had begun wearing the hijab out of fear. The new authorities, she added, were not Damascenes.

“They are not like us,” Laila said.

“And they consider all of us floul,” Hussain added, using the Arabic term for remnants of the old regime. “They consider us supporters of the tyrants.”

For Laila, the deepest loss was social. “We grew up never asking about religion,” she said. “We connected because we were human. Now, when you meet someone, you don’t say, ‘How are you?’ You say, ‘What’s your religion?'”

She described a video circulating online of a man who was nearly killed after being asked about his sect. “If someone asks who you are,” she said, “you don’t know what will happen.”

Taef, a Sunni woman from al Hasakah in northeast Syria, worried about who held power and what they might do. “We don’t know who the government is anymore,” she said. “We don’t know if the person walking behind us wants to kill us or hurt us.”

What they were describing wasn’t chaos. It was the collapse of mediation — the end of a state that, however brutal and unequal, had at least kept sectarian violence from the streets.

The Assad regime was deeply sectarian in structure. Alawites, the Shia-adjacent minority from which the Assad family came, dominated the security services and the regime’s coercive institutions. Sunnis, though the majority, were largely excluded from real power. Christians, Druze, and other minorities were marginalized but often relied on the regime for protection from Islamist rule. Yet the state avoided sectarian language and presented itself as a secular bulwark. For minorities and secular Sunnis alike, protection was transactional and coercive, but real enough to shape daily life. If someone disappeared, you knew which branch might have taken them. The state, however oppressive, remained the ultimate arbiter.

That predictability is now gone. Security gaps have widened, and revenge killings linked to wartime grievances have increased. Robberies and kidnappings are widely reported. Former soldiers and civil servants from the old regime are often jobless, dragging families into poverty and resentment. Armed men operate with overlapping mandates, and rules shift from place to place and week to week.

Syria’s new rulers, drawn from HTS’s Sunni Islamist leadership, have inverted the old hierarchy. But rather than building a new civic order, the transition has unleashed older resentments and made sect, rather than citizenship, the primary marker of safety and belonging.

Sectarian language, once taboo in public life, is now openly spoken. Labels that long existed beneath the surface increasingly shape who feels safe, who stays out late, who covers up, and who begins to consider leaving.

For Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities, the fear is not that the new authorities are uniformly hostile, but that protection is inconsistent, and accountability is thin. The Syrian government insists it is governing for all Syrians, and Western governments have cautiously welcomed those assurances.

In July 2025, the U.S. State Department revoked its designation of HTS as a terrorist organization. In November 2025, President Trump welcomed al Sharaa for the first-ever White House meeting between an American president and a Syrian head of state. The following month, Congress repealed the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2026, lifting the sweeping economic sanctions imposed during the Assad era.

On the ground, many Christians remain unconvinced. The new authorities have struggled to impose a monopoly on force, curb sectarian violence, or hold perpetrators accountable when minorities are attacked.

During our visit, Christmas displays were visible in Damascus, Tartous, and Aleppo. Lights hung over streets. People from various backgrounds took photos in front of large Christmas trees and creches. On first glance, it looked like any other Christmas.

But privately, many Christians described something else entirely.

Walking through Bab Touma, Damascus’s historic Christian quarter, we passed families lingering near churches as women ladled out burbara, a wheat-berry porridge traditionally shared on the feast day of St. Barbara before Christmas.

Rania, a mother of two who attends a nearby parish, said warnings from Islamists had been circulating for months, both online and in person. One message, she recalled, was blunt: “It’s your turn.”

Others described taunts in the street — being called infidels, told to cover up, or watching priests spat on in their own neighborhoods.

Christianity in Syria predates the modern state by nearly two millennia. For centuries, churches were woven into the country’s civic fabric. But after more than a decade of civil war — including attacks by the Islamic State, repression under the former regime, and instability under the new one — many Christians say each political shift has delivered the same lesson: They are caught between forces they do not control and institutions they do not trust.

Syria’s Christian population has declined by roughly 80% since the war began. Hundreds of thousands fled amid kidnappings of clergy, attacks on churches, and sectarian violence. Church leaders say departures have accelerated over the past year, driven less by ideology than by a growing belief that the state can no longer protect them.

Those fears hardened on June 22, 2025, when an attacker struck Mar Elias, a Greek Orthodox church in Damascus, killing 25 people and injuring more than 60 during evening services. The Islamic State was blamed for the attack, though a separate jihadist group also claimed responsibility.

Father Youhanna Suleiman Shehada, the church’s pastor, said insecurity had long shaped daily life, but the attack marked a psychological rupture. “It affected the families,” he told us. “And it is still affecting them. We are still trying to recover.”

When we visited Mar Elias, services had been moved out of the sanctuary, and repairs were ongoing. A mother whose teenage daughter survived the attack said the girl had begun psychological treatment. Asked whether she feared what might come next, the mother replied simply: “Of course we are afraid.”

Father Shehada said families were now openly discussing leaving Syria — a shift from earlier years, when church leaders often discouraged emigration despite hardship. “We don’t know what will happen next,” he said. “That is where the fear lies. But we will pray, as usual.”

None of this is an argument for nostalgia about Assad’s rule, which was marked by repression, torture, and mass displacement. Under the former regime, protection was coercive and transactional. But many Christians say that under the new order, protection feels uncertain or absent altogether — particularly in a country now governed by former affiliates of a movement that views them as apostates.

That dilemma has become especially acute in southern Syria. In July 2025, fighting between Druze and Bedouin factions around Sweida forced dozens of Christian families to flee nearby villages. Syrian security forces entered the area as violence escalated, leaving civilians caught between rival armed groups.

At a church-run shelter in Khabab, roughly an hour south of Damascus, displaced families described fleeing with little warning as fighting closed in. Homes were burned or ransacked, churches were damaged, and cemeteries desecrated. Some families were allowed to return briefly under escort, only to leave again.

Several said they had believed their villages would be spared, as they had been during earlier flare-ups. Instead, informal guarantees collapsed in a political landscape where authority is fragmented and enforcement uneven.

“What we need is protection,” one displaced Christian said. “Protection and laws that work. If someone harms me and I file a complaint, I want to believe I will get my rights.”

Displacement has brought other strains. With few opportunities to work, many families now rely almost entirely on charity. Aid groups have provided limited cash assistance, church officials said, but one-time payments have done little to offer a viable future. “We don’t want handouts,” one man said. “We want work.”

A husband and wife, expecting their first daughter, described leaving their village with a few clothes for their young son, believing they would return the same day. They did not. Their home was later destroyed.

Others emphasized how abruptly sectarian identity had replaced everyday coexistence. In Sweida, where Christian villages are scattered among Druze and Bedouin communities, one Christian resident said tensions over land and property disputes had existed for years but were previously contained. “This government came and gave those tensions space to erupt,” he said.

Another couple described life before the fighting in simple terms. “We never thought to say, ‘I’m Christian’ or ‘I’m Druze,'” the woman said. “At school, at celebrations, on holidays — we lived as one community.”

For Syria’s Christians, the question now is less about pluralism in theory than protection in practice. Their future, many said, depends on whether the new authorities can deter violence and hold perpetrators accountable when minorities are attacked.

For the Druze community, the violence in Sweida brought a similar reckoning.

During the July 2025 fighting in Sweida, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights documented nearly 2,000 deaths. Human Rights Watch documented 86 apparently unlawful killings of civilians, the majority of them Druze. In a subsequent investigation, Amnesty International documented evidence of extrajudicial executions of 46 Druze people by government and government-affiliated forces.

In the aftermath, the violence produced an uneven opening: greater latitude to speak, alongside deeper anxiety about where the country was heading. Tanam, a journalist from Sweida who had written under a pseudonym during the Assad years, said he now published under his own name. In that sense, speech had opened up. But he worried less about state repression than about what was replacing it.

“I’m afraid of the hate speech between the people,” he said. “If you are Sunni and with the government, there is space for you. If not, you are far away.”

Yara, a civil engineer in her 20s from Sweida, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, had been living in Damascus for years when the violence erupted back home. When she returned weeks later, she said the city’s residents moved through their days with practiced numbness. “Life continues,” she said. “But some wounds don’t close.”

What had changed most fundamentally was how people related to one another.

“We never used to ask who was what,” she said. “We ate together, drank together, went on trips together. We were friends.” She paused. “My best friend of 12 years — I only found out a couple years ago that she’s Christian. That’s how we lived.”

Neither Yara nor Tanam expressed nostalgia for Assad, but both described Syria’s transition as something less than liberation. Protection no longer flowed predictably from the state. It depended on proximity, affiliation, and chance. Identity, once something many Syrians avoided naming, now determined who could move freely, who could work, and whether they had a future in Syria at all.

For Alawites, that shift has carried the most immediate risk.

Hassan Ahmad arrived in Damascus at dawn to meet us, bringing a driver, another young Alawite man. The three-hour journey from Tartous had been terrifying, they said, not because of the roads, but because of who might stop them at checkpoints.

Hassan, a 27-year-old activist, began opposing the Assad regime as a teenager. At 15, he started following foreign news coverage of Syria’s uprising, trying to understand what was unfolding. Two years later, he began posting criticism of Assad online.

“I knew it was not safe,” he said. “I knew that I would get arrested. But I couldn’t be a chicken.”

He was detained multiple times. In 2023, the Air Force Intelligence set an ambush and picked him up from a Tartous street. He spent two months in solitary confinement at a Damascus military airport, then six more months in Latakia Central Prison. The charges included “undermining the prestige of the state.” He was moved through five different courts before a judge released him on a fine.

When he returned home, he learned that his father had died a month earlier.

The Alawite community’s response to his activism had been mixed. Some agreed with him but stayed silent out of fear. Others accused him of recklessness.

That changed after Assad fell. For many Alawites, fear hardened into certainty after massacres along the Mediterranean coast in March 2025, when armed men swept through Alawite villages in Latakia and Tartous, killing nearly 1,400 civilians and forcing families to flee. The government described the attacks as the work of rogue actors. Residents described something else: organized violence, carried out openly, and left unpunished. In the months since, thousands of Alawites crossed into neighboring Lebanon, leaving behind homes, jobs, and extended families for an uncertain and often precarious future.

Hassan began documenting killings and kidnappings of Alawites, speaking out against abuses by the new authorities. This time, the community backed him.

But support has not meant safety. Hassan now works with nongovernmental organizations and foreign journalists, facilitating interviews with families of massacre and kidnapping victims and documenting what he describes as systematic exclusion and violence. He has received death threats, including one published on a Telegram channel with more than half a million followers.

The new government, he said, has brought certain freedoms. Salaries for state employees have risen. Foreign journalists can work more openly. People criticize the government in ways they could not before.

But those freedoms have come alongside what Hassan describes as an institutional sectarian reordering. Alawites, he said, have been excluded from the police and security forces. Many victims and activists say those responsible for attacks on Alawite communities have not been held accountable. Human Rights Watch warned in January that the transitional government has failed to deliver justice for sectarian killings in Sweida, documenting dozens of unlawful civilian deaths and citing a broader pattern of impunity following violent outbreaks.

For Hassan, the problem was that the new government, in his view, had inherited the violence, corruption, and economic cruelty of the old one.

His goal now is to finish his degree and find a scholarship abroad, ideally in Europe. “I don’t feel safe because I’m an Alawite,” he said. “So how would it be as an Alawite activist?”

Asked if he felt hope for the future, Hassan paused. “I don’t feel hope,” he said. “But I cannot stop doing what I am doing.”

Back at Aznavour, the conversation turned to what had improved since the regime’s fall. The list was real, if modest. Hussain noted that Syrians could now hold dollars openly, something unthinkable under Assad. “We used to dream of handling dollars, and now we actually can,” he said.

Laila mentioned photography. “Before, if you were caught with a camera, it was considered a crime,” she said. Now she could photograph freely and post political opinions that would once have led to arrest.

But when the subject shifted to the future, the mood changed.

Almost everyone we spoke with wanted to leave Syria. For some, it was an active plan. For others, a wish they knew might never materialize. But the desire was nearly universal.

“Honestly, I wish I could leave the country today or tomorrow,” Laila said. “Please, help me get out of this country. All of us are trying to get out of the country.”

Jannah, the Circassian lawyer, said her law degree had become worthless. “Sectarianism has increased more than before, and there’s nothing to give us hope that the country might improve.”

Laila tried to imagine what might come next. “Based on my reading of human history, Syria is likely heading toward sectarian conflict and fragmentation,” she said. “I believe the country may improve after 10 years, but everything before that will be long and painful.”

The problem, said Hussain, is that the system hasn’t changed — just the names and sects who happen to be in power. “Bashar is gone and al Julani came,” he said, using al Sharaa’s former nom de guerre. “Both represent the same criminality and violence. If the situation continues like this, I believe we are heading toward a civil war, a bloody one.”

SYRIA’S KURDS HAVE A PROBLEM 

Outside, Damascenes moved through their evening routines along stone-paved lanes. Families walked past the restaurant. Vendors sold grilled corn and sweets. The city looked almost normal.

But inside, among young people who had spent most of their lives at war, the question was no longer whether Syria would change, but whether they would still be there to see it.

Daniel Allott is an opinion editor at USA Today and author of On the Road in Trump’s America. Jordan Allott, a filmmaker and photographer, is the founder of In Altum Productions.