LGBT Syrians Hang in the Balance
On November 27, 2024, Syrian opposition groups, led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), launched an attack on one of Syria’s biggest cities, Aleppo, quickly taking control of it. Within 11 days, the regime had fallen. When the Syrian capital, Damascus, fell to rebels on the night of December 8th, it ended the Assad family’s brutal, 53-year dictatorship.
Thousands of people flocked to the capital, rejoicing in the streets and embracing loved ones who’d finally been liberated from the secret prisons where the Assad regime jailed its political opponents (and their kids). Western journalists reported on the rebels — now the new government — rescuing captives from Sednaya prison, a five-story complex deep underground known as the “human slaughterhouse” among locals. Bashar al-Assad, infamous for carrying out horrific chemical attacks on his own population, fled the country to Russia. Statues of Assad’s father, the previous Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, who once massacred 20,000 of his own people in the city of Hama, have been destroyed all around the country. And social media lit up with celebration from the Syrian diaspora community.
The revolution stands as a clear example of what happens when a tyrant pushes their people too far. But why then are some Americans, both far-right and far-left, condemning the events in Syria and the end of Assad’s regime? And what does the change in leadership mean for Syrian LGBT people, who have been all but forgotten in the tumult?
Bashar al-Assad’s Persecution of LGBT People
Don’t be fooled by the name — Bashar al-Assad's “Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party” may have been socialist, but as we’ve seen throughout history, “socialism” is hardly progressive. Ba’ath fit perfectly with the socialists who ruled the Soviet Union or who now rule North Korea — murderous, repressive, and eager to imprison and torture critics or political opposition.
In 2011, during the Arab Spring, 15 Syrian teenagers were arrested and tortured for writing pro-Arab Spring graffiti. When their parents tried to recover their sons from the prison holding them, the guards laughed in their faces, offering to rape the boys’ mothers to make them “new children.” One of the boys, 13-year-old Hamza al-Khatib, died under torture. Just like in other authoritarian countries such as China and Russia, everyone who condemns such brutality is considered a “Western agent.”
This is how Bashar al-Assad justified his oppression of LGBT Syrians — by claiming he was merely combatting “Western influence.” During her visit to China in 2023, Assad’s British-educated First Lady Asma al-Assad denounced the LGBT community, saying that she was proud of her husband’s fight against “modern liberalism” that was “tampering with human beings” and creating a “third gender.” In Syria, homosexuality and bisexuality are officially criminalised, which makes LGBT activism practically impossible.
As a 2021 COAR report on Syrian LGBT rights explained:
“Government of Syria detention centres and prisons have routinely been identified as sites of torture and abuse, including sexual and gender-based violence and humiliation for those suspected of LGBTQ+ identity. The documented abuses include forced nudity, rape, and anal or vaginal ‘examinations’ carried out by Syrian government forces (and by armed groups), often as a tool of coercion or punishment in detention facilities.”
It’s no wonder that most Syrians with whom I have spoken avoid the subject of LGBT rights. Under the Assad regime, anti-LGBT oppression was widespread as part of a broader terror campaign against Syrian population. Exactly how many people were imprisoned, killed, or harmed is difficult to say, as the Assad government controlled all information, rendering any statistics a self-serving propaganda tool. Case in point: the same regime that voters apparently loved so much that Assad won 92.2% of the vote in 2014 and 95.1% in 2021 was violently overthrown in a fortnight three and a half years later.
The persecution of LGBT people also provided a convenient pretext for cracking down on straight cisgender dissidents, who were routinely swept up by authorities, accused of being in same-sex relationships, and often subjected to rape and sexual assault. Conditions were bad enough that in 2012, gay, bi, and lesbian Syrians were openly joining the anti-Assad resistance despite the violently repressive and homophobic climate.
The Rebels
We have established that Assad was an autocratic despot, but are these new rebels any better? Well, it depends on which rebel groups we’re talking about.
Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the leading group within the successful insurgency, has quite an unusual history. HTS leader and founder Ahmed al-Sharaa, previously known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Julani, originally made a name for himself as a member of the terrorist organisation al-Qaeda in Iraq. In 2011, following the Arab Spring, al-Sharaa’s jihadi colleague Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi sent him to Syria to establish a new Al-Qaeda branch. But in 2013, when al-Baghdadi outed al-Sharaa’s connection to al-Qaeda to the media and declared the formation of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), al-Sharaa broke ties with his former friend, denoting his hard sectarian politics. According to al-Sharaa's own words in a recent CNN interview, he parted ways with Baghdadi because he does not support ISIS’s indiscriminate attacks on civilians.
In 2016, after al-Sharaa left al-Qaeda and created HTS, he explained that his shift was initially a calculated political move to distance himself from the globally condemned al-Qaeda, but has recently claimed a more dramatic shift in his beliefs.
But how far can al-Sharaa and HTS be trusted?
Western tankies like the online influencer Jackson Hinkle, along with his counterparts on the far-right, have a soft spot for authoritarian regimes like Assad’s and a strong instinct to cozy up to any opponent of the liberal West. To them, al-Sharaa is nothing more than an “al-Qaeda” man and a “former ISIS leader”, and HTS, in Vice President J.D. Vance’s words, is an “offshoot of ISIS.” In truth, al-Sharaa broke away from al-Qaeda nearly a decade ago and has never been part of ISIS. His most recent contact with al-Qaeda was in 2021 as part of HTS’s efforts to crack down on the group. That said, al-Sharaa and HTS’s connections to some of the 21st century’s most infamous terrorist groups are hard to overlook.
No one has any illusions about al-Qaeda and ISIS’s genocidal anti-LGBT views nor their public executions of LGBT people, primarily gay and bisexual men, who were thrown from high rooftops to their deaths. The brutality of ISIS went beyond even most jihadist groups and governments in predominantly Muslim countries that punish homosexuality with the death penalty, because ISIS punished not just men who were caught in the act, but all aspects of LGBT culture. Just like many other authoritarian regimes — including Russia, which helped the Assad government stay in power for years, not to mention the Assad regime itself — ISIS believed that the West was the source of “sodomy.” In September 2014, ISIS published a treatise against Western “crusaders”, promoting conspiracy theories noting that “San Francisco is considered the capital of sodomy, where [LGBT people] comprise a fourth of the state's constituency.”
While nowhere near as powerful as they were in the 2010s, ISIS is still active in Syria, and they haven’t changed their position on LGBT rights. Should HTS’s Syrian Salvation Government falter, ISIS will be among the groups vying for its power.
But what about HTS itself? The al-Nusra Front, an HTS precursor group and an official branch of al-Qaeda, was also known for executing LGBT people. Is HTS really an improvement over al-Qaeda, ISIS, or Assad?
Aaron Zelin, director of the Islamic State Worldwide Activity Map at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of The Age of Political Jihadism: A Study of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (2022) told Foreign Policy in December 2024:
“If there's a quick way of understanding it, HTS essentially went from global jihad to a local regime. They aren’t liberal democrats, but they also aren’t part of the global jihadi movement anymore. They’re still conservative Islamists who run an authoritarian government, though.”
This distinction matters more than it might at first glance. Global jihadists, like al-Qaeda and ISIS, are prone to see the world in an extreme black-and-white way, as a struggle for survival between Islam and a worldwide Crusader-Zionist alliance, with LGBT people being a Western export meant to infect the Muslim world.
While HTS is not on par with groups like ISIS, when the Salvation Government gained control of the northern Syrian province of Idlib in 2017, after briefly relaxing rules around Islamic religious morality, they too ended up enforcing compulsory veiling and bans on smoking and mixed-sex parties.
That said, al-Sharaa has undergone a fair amount of change over the years, even in his style and rhetoric. Nowadays, he sounds more like a politician than a young jihadi with a fire in his belly. He insists that religion shouldn’t be pushed on people and that he won’t force anyone to accept Islam, and has promised protection to national and religious minorities. He has made encouraging remarks about women’s education, said that he’s helping to find and liberate American citizens imprisoned by the Assad regime, and vowed not to repeat its crimes against civilians. He has already demonstrated a better track record of respecting individual rights than the Assad regime or ISIS when HTS was ruling Idlib, as they engaged with the Christian and Druze communities there. Now, there is a special Directorate of Minority Affairs inside the Salvation Government.
Certainly, al-Sharaa appears to be saying most of the right things. Whether he is sincere is another matter. HTS’s Salvation Government has not elevated any women or members of minority groups to high-ranking posts, and has given no indication on its policies regarding LGBT people. Still, it’s impossible to imagine groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS making the kinds of statements and promises we’ve seen from al-Sharaa, even in lip service. Muhammad al-Bahsir, the current prime minister of the Salvation Government, is presently creating a new political system in Syria. We should have a fairly definitive answer soon enough, but that answer, while likely to clear the admittedly low bar of “better than ISIS”, will almost certainly not be up to Western human rights standards. As Aaron Zelin pointed out on the Popular Front podcast: “Just because they [are] no longer interested in terrorism abroad doesn't mean that all of a sudden [they] want rights for gay people and trans people.”
The Fears of the Syrian Diaspora
LGBT Syrians may be unlikely to get a Western-style slate of human rights and legal protections, but establishing a foundation where minorities are at least recognised as human beings and where citizens have a real opportunity to influence their government would be a transformative step forward. This obviously wasn’t the case with the Assad regime. If the Salvation Government manages to become a democracy, or even moves meaningfully in that direction, substantive changes are possible in the near future even with a conservative Islamist government.
The balancing act needed, when evaluating the current situation in Syria, is neither to whitewash the Assad regime’s crimes against humanity because HTS isn’t LGBT friendly enough, nor to forget about LGBT people if they are overlooked in the Salvation Government’s reforms.
When I reached out to my sources across the Syrian diaspora, they expressed two main fears when it comes to LGBT rights. Some believe that the West only cares about state repression when it’s LGBT people. There is a kernel of truth to this. For example, in Chechnya, the Western media failed to cover the Russian government’s daily terror campaign of kidnappings and abductions. In 2020, however, the HBO docudrama Welcome to Chechnya, about the disappearance of LGBT people, portrayed Russia's mass terror policies as specifically targeting LGBT people when in fact it was widespread. This is similar to the crimes of the Assad government, which were typically covered more when they concerned LGBT people than when they were indiscriminate, as they often were.
The other concern that has been voiced to me is that the new Syrian leadership will successfully convince the West that it is a legitimate democratic government. The fear, specifically, is that Western countries will ,in turn, suspend or revoke asylum claims and send refugees back to a society that may be less autocratic, but will still not have robust LGBT rights. In all the euphoria over Assad’s overthrow and a new and improved government, it would be easy to forget about these people or dismiss them as a necessary and minor tradeoff.
Western governments could make a huge mistake here. Already, the UK and Germany have paused asylum claims, and Austria is even preparing a plan for the deportation of Syrian refugees. Amid all the chaos, tumult, and hopefully progress, it is important to remember that even now Syria is not a safe country for LGBT people and their families, nor is it likely to be even if the most optimistic reformist version of the new government is established. The Arab Spring, too, once seemed awfully promising — until it wasn’t. If Western countries jump the gun and send Syrians back to their country of birth, we may simply be starting this whole cycle right back up again.
Published Jan 22, 2025
