Syrian Christian in Massachusetts on Crackdown at Home

Anchor Marco Werman talks to a Syrian architect named Salah Asfoura, who lives in Worcester, MA.

Asfoura, who is a Christian, is regularly in touch with family back home and he talks about the fears of the Christian community in Syria right now.

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Marco Werman: I am Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston. You may recall a couple of weeks ago we had a global hit on Syrian wedding singer turned rock superstar, Omar Souleyman. He was playing at a club near our studios here in Boston.

Omar Souleyman: [Speaking Arabic] Translator: What he is saying is he will never sing any other singers’ songs…

Werman: Well, my translator at the show was Salah Asfoura. He is Syrian Christian, an architect and has lived in Worcester, Massachusetts since 1992. He says while Syria is often thought of solely as a Muslim country there are Christians there too. In fact, many say Christianity began in Syria when St. Paul landed in Damascus nearly 2,000 years ago.

Salah Asfoura: You know, he was an outlaw. He was a criminal. He was in Damascus and he converted there in a small place they call Knanaya Church which still exists right now; you can visit there.

Werman: Now, Syria is officially a secular country with many religious sects, mostly Sunni Muslims but also Shi’a and smaller groups like Sufis and Alawites – the ethnicity President Assad belongs to. There is even a very small Jewish community. Christians make up about 10 percent of the country and they are especially scared right now. Since the uprising and the crackdown began, Asfoura told me that his family’s daily routine here in the U.S. follows the same pattern.

Asfoura: We wake up every morning, I start making the phone calls. It takes me like every day two, three hours just to go through the news, different web page, make the phone calls and by the time when you are done…by 10 in the morning, emotionally it kills you. I will tell you that for the last year my productivity went down to less than 50 percent. I just cannot concentrate and I do design work so it takes a lot of concentration but it takes a lot away from your energy.

Werman: In modern times, Christians have supported the Assad family. Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez insisted on a secular Syrian state to prevent sectarian violence between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims and to keep the Islamist forces at bay. That made Christians pretty happy and it ensured their support for the Assad family, but day after bloody day for the past year that equation feels increasingly irrelevant for Syrian Christians. Most of Asfoura’s extended family lives in Homs. They’ve reported to him that parts of Homs have been badly damaged but they are lucky to live in a relatively untouched part of the city. Still, there’s a lot at stake for Syrian Christians. When anti-Assad militants entered Homs last year, they occupied the oldest central part of the city – a primarily Christian neighborhood. Asfoura says when that happened many Christians there just packed their bags and left. So, I asked him, did the militants in Syria have issues with the Christian community?

Asfoura: Only if you stay in their way. For example, there’s a town between Homs and Lebanon – Qusayr. Qusayr has been a mixed town like 50 percent Christians and Muslims. So, in this town, the militants took over also because it’s a very strategic point for them between Lebanon and Syria to smuggle fighters and weapons and everything else. So, some Christian families did not show resistance but they didn’t want to work with the fighters and at least 10 people were killed.

Werman: The future seems even more grim for Syrian Christians when they recall the example of Iraq just next door after the U.S. invasion. Asfoura says, in Syria like Iraq, the fight could get sectarian at any moment and Christians would be hard-pressed to defend themselves.

Asfoura: In Iraq 2003, before the war of Iraq, there is no exact numbers but there used to be living in Iraq more than 2 million Christians. Right now, there is less than half a million and this was under the watch of the American army. When these things happen, Christians have no protection. All you have to do is just send a car-bomb to their neighborhood and they will all leave. They have no weapon, they have no fighters and they have no international support. They are really an insignificant, small minority in the Middle East. If you ask me personally, I think that the value of the oil in the Middle East is much higher than the Christian minorities.

Werman: Salah Asfoura, a Syrian Christian living in the United States which is, for all intents and purposes, a Christian country, but up till now he says Syrian Christians in the U.S. haven’t played that card. They’re still fairly confident that atrocities back home won’t destroy the Christian population.

Asfoura: We still have some faith that’s not going to happen to the Christians in Syria. We still have some faith that something is going to happen; either it’s gonna be finished in a military way or they’re gonna sit at one table and talk and solve the situation. On the other hand, there’s actually, in Boston alone, there’s four different Syrian churches. In Worcester alone we have three of them and all they can do right now is just collect money so they can send it over to help families. That’s all they can do right now.

Werman: Salah Asfoura, a Syrian Christian and a resident of Worcester, Mass. reflecting on life of Christians back home.

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