Christians in Lebanon Celebrate Downfall of Assad While Those in Syria Worry About Future

Christians in parts of Lebanon celebrated the downfall of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad over the weekend, gathering in town squares to launch celebratory fireworks and gleefully tearing down pictures of Assad from border crossings.

Among the Christian groups happiest to see the end of the Assad dynasty is the Lebanese Forces Party (LF), a militia group and current political party active during Lebanon’s civil war in 1976 led by a Maronite Christian leader named Bachir Gemayel, an ally of the U.S. and Israel, who was assassinated less than a month after being elected president of Lebanon in 1982 in a bomb attack that also killed dozens of his supporters. The assassination triggered further bloodshed, including an LF attack on Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon guarded by Israeli forces that killed hundreds of people.

Dr. Samir Geagea, current leader of the LF, said on Monday that Lebanese Christians have long blamed the Assad regime – then under the command of Bashar Assad’s father Hafez – for using terrorist cutouts to murder Gemayel because he was allied with Israel and opposed to Syrian influence in Lebanon. The assassinations of Lebanese Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt in 1977 and Sunni Lebanese President Rafik Hariri in 2005, along with the deaths of numerous other figures in Lebanon, are similarly believed by the Lebanese to have been targeted killings orchestrated by the Assad regime to protect its interests in Lebanon.

Geagea told leaders of his party they should view Assad’s overthrow as “the day of Bachir Gemayel.”

“They assassinated him, but turned him into a symbol,” Geagea said of Gemayel. “This is also a day of justice – not just for Syria, but for Lebanon.”

The LF leader urged Hezbollah, Iran’s terrorist proxy and political party in Lebanon, to surrender its weapons and abandon its dreams of dominion by force, since Syria was a vital link in its supply chain of Iranian weapons. With Syria under the control of a Sunni jihadist alliance opposed to Iran, Hezbollah would be very hard-pressed to rebuild the combat capacity that was annihilated during its ill-fated war with Israel over the past year.

“The game is over,” Geagea told Hezbollah. “Every day you delay is a day wasted, for yourselves and for all Lebanese.”

“This is the beginning of building a true state in Lebanon,” he declared.

Lebanese media channel MTV on Sunday marked the fall of Assad by commemorating the Lebanese victims of his regime, including Gemayel, Jumblatt, and Hariri. There were many more names on the list, including journalist Samir Kassir, a prominent Lebanese critic of the Syrian regime who was killed by a car bomb in 2005.

Lebanon’s MTV channel also broadcast a fireworks display in Beirut celebrating the fall of Assad’s regime.

Some Christians in Syria were thankful for the protection Assad extended to their communities, viewing him as the lesser evil compared to the hardcore Islamists who would eventually overthrow him. In the early months of the war, some Syrian Christian leaders openly stated they would prefer Assad to win quickly, because they feared the horrors of ISIS and al-Qaeda even more.

Lebanese Christians had fewer reasons to appreciate Assad’s rule, and they have long memories of the murders ordered by his family.

There are relatively few Christians left in Syria after ten years of a brutal civil war and the rise of the Islamic State. When the civil war began in 2011, there were about 1.5 million Christians in Syria, but today there are less than 300,000. Many of them fled into Lebanon, especially after ISIS began wiping out ancient Christian communities.

Lebanon’s Christian refugees from Syria can only hope that Assad’s downfall, and the general disaster of Iran’s proxy war against Israel, will weaken Hezbollah and give Lebanon a chance to build a functioning government and multi-ethnic society after years of corruption and stagnation.

Their odds of ever returning home to Syria have dimmed with an al-Qaeda offshoot holding power in Damascus – an outcome many of them feared throughout the long, bloody years of the Syrian civil war.