Syria’s minorities voiced distress and confusion this week over German and British silence on sectarian violence during Ahmed al-Sharaa’s visit, representatives of persecuted religious groups told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.
Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani, was welcomed in Berlin on Monday, where his supporters rallied outside his five-star hotel, according to Bild. The 43-year-old met with Chancellor Friedrich Merz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
Despite a catalog of violence in Syria, some of it attributed to Syrian officials in a recent United Nations report, Merz argued that the country had “fundamentally improved” and said that some of the roughly one million Syrians living in Germany who no longer have the right to residency should return.
Gülistan Savgat, a Yazidi-Kurdish board member of the Kurdish-Jewish Alliance, told the Post that her “blood ran cold” at the sight of Merz “talking to a terrorist about [returning] criminals.”
“In 2014, the Islamic State virtually wiped out my religious community, the Yazidis, in Sinjar in northern Iraq. One of the worst massacres and genocides against the Yazidis, and Julani was right there. Julani was an al-Qaeda terrorist and helped build up IS in Iraq. Later, he founded the al-Nusra Front and is partly responsible for the genocide against the Yazidis,” she said, adding that she refuses to call him Sharaa because it allows him to escape the reputation he developed as a terrorist.
“We all saw the images from January 2026 of HTS militias throwing Kurdish women from their homes. These were images reminiscent of ISIS, and the world watched. The world watched as Julani and his HTS militias carried out massacres against Kurds in Rojava, and the world is watching now as he is treated like royalty in Europe. From being on the international terror watch list to walking the red carpet in Berlin. Julani has never publicly distanced himself from his terrorist and Islamic ideology, and yet Europe is negotiating with one of the greatest terrorists in our history.”
Sectarian violence continues across country
Outside two large attacks on the Alawite community in March and the Druze community in July, sectarian violence has persisted across the country, according to an independent international commission of inquiry report published last week by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Only last week, the Syrian Christian town Al-Suqaylabiyah came under attack by men from the nearby Sunni town of Qalaat al-Madiq.
Savgat added that while Merz, a member of the Christian Democratic Union, was meeting Sharaa, Christian communities in Syria were under attack.
“Why didn’t Mr. Merz mention the abducted Eva Michelmann and Ahmet Polat, who were arrested by the Syrian Transitional Government in Raqqa on January 18 and have been missing ever since?” she asked, adding that the Kurdish-Jewish Alliance is calling on Europe to investigate missing members of the Yazidi community, pressure Sharaa to protect minorities, and act in accordance with international law.
On Tuesday, supporters of Sharaa gathered during his visit to London, according to photos published by Reuters. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer met with Sharaa and discussed migration, border security, and efforts to combat people smuggling, according to a statement from his office. A Downing Street spokesperson said Starmer welcomed steps taken by Sharaa’s government to combat IS in Syria. The statement did not reference sectarian violence.
“We want Syria to have strong relationships across the region, with Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and global powers such as the UK, France, Germany, and the United States,” Sharaa said at an event hosted by Chatham House in London. “We have had enough war. We have paid a heavy price. We are not ready for another war.”
A., a Syrian Druze who lost 14 loved ones in the attacks on southern Syria and who spoke to the Post first after the massacre in Sweida, shared that while Britain had become like a home to him, seeing Sharaa embraced in London sparked new waves of grief.
“People talk about these things in the language of policy. Stability. Transition. Re-engagement. Regional realism. I understand why governments speak like that, I do. States deal in interests. Diplomats like doors left open. But when you are Druze, when you have buried family and counted the names of friends who are not coming back, that language lands like an insult. It feels bloodless. Worse, it feels deliberate,” he wrote to the Post.
“To see Sharaa embraced in Europe after that was not just painful. It was disorienting. It made me feel that our dead had already been filed away into the usual category: regrettable, complicated, unfortunate, but not inconvenient enough to change anyone’s plans. That is the part people do not always understand. It is not only the loss itself. It is the speed with which others move on from it. One minute your community is bleeding, the next minute the same political class is shaking hands, taking meetings, talking about pragmatism, as if we are supposed to accept that this is maturity.”
A. said he wanted diplomats to acknowledge what had happened and take a slower approach to Syria, aware that embracing him so publicly and openly can “send a message” about what type and scale of violence is acceptable.
Dr. Tamim Khromachou, the president of the Levant Council of the United States and the Americans for Levant Foundation, told the Post that Sharaa had better curated his visit for European tastes, “employing language that conveys progress and openness” and shaking hands with women, but his presentation of “flexibility” was shallow.
“During forthcoming visits, such gestures may be framed as incremental concessions aimed at reassuring European leaders and audiences. These signals, however, risk providing a sense of moral reassurance that can obscure more troubling developments on the ground, particularly regarding minority rights,” Khromachou warned, adding that the ongoing violence against minorities in Syria was evidence that Sharaa hasn’t shed his Islamist values.
“Local accounts point to rising corruption, deepening injustice, an expansion of arbitrary detentions, increasing criminality, and a growing pattern of hostility toward minority communities…Parallel to these detentions, accounts describe the emergence of informal brokerage networks allegedly linked to security actors, through which significant sums are demanded in exchange for release, reportedly reaching $20,000 in one case and $200,000 in another,” he claimed.
“Taken together, these developments suggest a widening gap between external perceptions and internal realities. While al-Sharaa’s image abroad may be evolving toward that of a conventional statesman, conditions within Syria increasingly reflect fragmented authority, weakened rule of law, and patterns consistent with coercive patronage networks. The contrast raises broader questions for European policymakers.”
Khromachou stressed that the issue of minority rights is the core element of ensuring Syria’s long-term stability and should not be reduced to a “peripheral concern.”