Syria’s future constitution should guarantee the equality and inclusion of all religious minorities in order 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 al-Assad.

The transitional 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 sizable Alawite, Druze, Ismaili and Kurdish minorities.

An episode last July in Druze-majority Sweida province involved some of the worst internecine bloodshed the country had seen Assad’s toppling.

Syrian authorities recently began trying suspects over the wave of violence, which began with local clashes, to which the security forces then responded, after which Israel intervened.

More than 2,000 people were killed in the clashes, including 789 Druze civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor. A committee formed by the Syrian government said it had documented the killing of 1,760 people.

The number of Christians has also 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........

© The Times of Israel