ROME: Syria’s future constitution should guarantee the equality and inclusion of all religious minorities to stem emigration, a Syrian minister told AFP on Tuesday.
“We have to have a new constitution, which includes everybody, and (in which) everybody is equal under the law,” Syria’s Social Affairs and Labour Minister Hind Kabawat told AFP.
Kabawat is the only woman and only Christian in the Islamist transition government headed up by Ahmed Al-Sharaa set up after the 2024 fall of former president Bashar Assad.
The transition parliament set up since Al-Sharaa came to power has the task of coming up with a new constitution.
Syria, a majority Sunni Muslim country, is home to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.
There are also sizeable Alawite, Druze, Ismaili and Kurdish minorities.
The number of Christians has plunged — going down from around a million before the start of the civil war in 2011 — to around 300,000 people, according to experts.
Kabawat said the departure of Christians started long before Assad’s fall.
“I felt the acceleration since the massacres of Hama in the 1980s. Many Christians decided to leave. We used to be 15 percent, then 9 percent, then 4 percent,” she said.
Asked whether the departures had sped up since the fall of Assad, Kabawat said Syrians from different communities were still leaving.
“They’re worried, and they don’t know what kind of government this is,” she said, adding that the government needed to do more to show it was “inclusive.”
Kabawat is in Rome to meet Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday with around 20 Muslim and Christian officials from the Arab world.
