Influential evangelical leader says US shouldn’t give sanctions relief or recognition to Syria
JERUSALEM—The former al Qaeda terrorist and current Interim President of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, failed to stop a massacre of over 1,000 Syrians, including Christians, that unfolded last Thursday and continued over a period of days.
Al-Sharaa and his organization, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a U.S.-designated Sunni terrorist organization, toppled former Syrian President Bashar Assad in December.
Christian leaders and human rights activists have cast strong doubts on the capability of al-Sharra’s Islamist regime to build a democracy that can protect vulnerable religious minority groups.
“This is a warning that the Syrian government is not ready for prime time if it can’t protect a handful of vulnerable Christians who had absolutely nothing to do with this violence except being its victims,” Rev. Johnnie Moore, the president of The Congress of Christian Leaders, told Fox News Digital.
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Security forces loyal to the interim Syrian government ride in the back of a vehicle moving along a road in Syria’s western city of Latakia on March 9, 2025. (OMAR HAJ KADOUR/AFP via Getty Images)
After shocking online video footage showed Islamists engaging in massacres of Syrian Alawites—a minority religious population—al-Sharra claimed he would “hold accountable, firmly and without leniency, anyone who was involved in the bloodshed of civilians”. He added, “There will be no one above the law and anyone whose hands have been stained with the blood of Syrians will face justice sooner or later.”
Moore said, “It is a clear demonstration that this new government has failed at the first task of any government, which is to protect its citizens.”
New Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa seen in the village of Besnaya in Syria’s rebel-held northwestern Idlib province at the border with Turkey in 2024. (OMAR HAJ KADOUR/AFP via Getty Images)
He said that foreign fighters acting either at the direction of the Syrian government or embedded within it or behaving in an out-of-control way “indiscriminately and grotesquely killed countless civilians, including a number of Christians, that we personally verified were killed. And the numbers are rising.”
Moore said, “The new government in Syria may not be ISIS, but they are ‘Islamists.’” Al-Sharaa was also once a member of the Islamist State terrorist movement.
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Syrian families who fled the clashes in Syria arrive to cross into the northern village of Heker al-Daher in Akkar province, Lebanon, on Tuesday, March 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Moore lambasted the posture of the Europeans toward the hardcore Syrian Islamist regime by noting the European governments seem to be rewarding the regime in Damascus.
“And for this to happen within 24 hours of the United Kingdom announcing that they are waiving sanctions on the Syrian national bank and over 20 other entities is a warning sign to the entire Western world and the EU commission is continuing with its plans do a funding conference in the near future to help the new Syrian government.”
Moore continued, “The response from the U.S. should be the exact opposite. The United States should send a very, very clear message to the new Syrian government that there will be zero sanctions relief and there will be zero normalization of its treatment to the new Syrian government until it proves that it’s going to be able to protect all the citizens of Syria, including its vulnerable Christians.”
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Christians gather to celebrate Christmas at the Monastery of Our Lady of Saydnaya on Dec. 24, 2024 in Saydnaya, Syria. (Ali Haj Suleiman/Getty Images)
Moore noted that during the Syrian civil war, Christians were killed and displaced. In December, the Center for Religious Freedom’s Nina Shea and Moore discussed on Fox and Friends the threat to Christianity in Syria after rebels took over the capital and the U.S. role in protecting Christians.
The Christian population in Syria has shrunk considerably since the start of the 2011 Syrian civil war. There are an estimated 300,000 Christians in the war-torn nation. Prior to the Syrian civil war, the Syrian Christian community numbered 1.5 million.
