Estimates place Syria’s population at just over 20 million, but the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees recorded 6.6 million Syrians as refugees and another 6.7 million as internally displaced persons (IDPs) by the end of 2020. That population is religiously diverse: Sunni Muslims account for 74 percent; Alawite, Shi’a, and Isma’ili Muslims comprise 13 percent; Assyrians, Maronites, Armenians, and other Christians comprise 10 percent; Druze account for 3 percent; and a small number of Syrian Jews remain in Damascus and Aleppo. However, it is difficult to confirm these figures amid the country’s 10-year conflict, given the staggering number of displaced persons. A disproportionately high number of religious minority communities have fled during the decade of violence; some estimates suggest that as many as 677,000 Christians have left the country, diminishing from around 10 percent to 3.6 percent of the population. While Syria is a Sunni Muslim-majority country, the Alawite religious minority has dominated its political and military classes since Hafez al-Assad, current president Bashar al-Assad’s father, seized power in 1970. Over the subsequent four decades, the two Assad regimes retained a stranglehold on power through a complicated framework of Ba’athist ideology, repressive coercion, enticement of economic elites, and the cultivation of a perception of protection for other religious minorities. However, that fragile framework collapsed following a popular uprising in March 2011, which, after a brutal government response, devolved into armed conflict—first domestic, but encompassing a range of regional and global actors by mid-2015. The conflict has since been marked by the government’s utter disregard for civilian casualties, including targeting of hospitals, churches, and even schools in its effort to crush opposition. Positive Conditions under the AANES Not only has the AANES declared its systematic commitment to religious freedom, but it has also implemented that framework against the backdrop of serious external threats, complicated tribal dynamics that cross fraught ethnic and religious divides, and other potential barriers. Some practical religious freedom and political challenges persist under the AANES, stemming from the complicated relationship of its founding constituents with Kurdish nationalism and armed movements. These challenges include reports of underage conscription and ongoing—if diminishing—concerns from the Syriac Christian community regarding school curriculum, as well as persistent and pervasive fear among religious minorities of ISIS, the Assad regime, and Turkish-allied militias. Despite the AANES’s sincere efforts to assure that religious and other freedoms extend to members of all ethnic and religious communities under its administration, the fragility of its circumstances throughout 2020 translated to a religiously and ethnically diverse population that was justifiably uncertain whether it would remain as such in the years to come. SYRIA Background Religious Freedom Violations under Turkish Occupation The Turkish occupation of a wide swath of territory across northern Syria remained a serious threat in 2020—not only to the vulnerable population of that area, but also to the AANES itself. A significant part of that danger came from Turkey, as its government and military make no distinction between U.S.-designated terrorist group the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the AANES—given the latter’s origins in Syria’s Kurdish-led opposition and waning ties between the PKK and the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which is part of the SDF. Turkey’s incessant shelling of civilian areas in AANES/SDF areas across northern Syria, and the potential for expansion of its occupation, represented a direct threat to religious and ethnic minorities in those towns. However, its support for radical Islamist factions of the TFSA, also known as the Syrian National Army (SNA), was equally insidious and damaging, as they engaged in religious violence, abduction for ransom, and other atrocities. For example, Faylaq al-Sham—a TFSA faction operating in Turkish-occupied Afrin—laid siege to the town of Basufan and arrested a number of its inhabitants in December, including a Yazidi woman, Ghazala Mannan Salmo, who reportedly faced severe torture in detention. This militia and others also defaced or destroyed a series of Yazidi shrines in the same area and across the occupation zone, potentially as many as 18 since 2018. Syriac, Armenian, and other Christian communities, too, faced parallel threats; for example, in August, a TFSA-backed court in Afrin detained Radwan Muhammad, a Kurdish convert to Christianity, and charged him with apostasy for his beliefs. Key U.S. Policy U.S. policy toward Syria in 2020 continued to confront the complicated and shifting dynamics that have confounded it since the outbreak of the Syrian uprising in 2011 and the country’s subsequent devolution into armed conflict. In late 2019, then President Donald J. Trump announced the withdrawal of U.S. forces from northeast Syria, in part precipitating Turkey’s renewed invasion of parts of the area and prompting uncertainty regarding the sustainability of the U.S.-SDF partnership. It later became clear, however, that a limited U.S. military presence would remain in the area indefinitely, as was the case throughout 2020. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) remained a crucial conduit of help for beleaguered civilians in Syria; in September, then Acting Administrator John Barsa announced a new package of $720 million in humanitarian assistance for Syria, bringing the total of U.S. aid since the start of the conflict to over $12 billion. The Caesar Civilian Protection Act of 2019 also came into effect in June 2020, resulting in a series of U.S. sanctions on Syrian regime officials along with regime-affiliated entities and businesses suspected of enabling or committing atrocities on civilian populations. U S C I R F – R E C O M M E N D E D F O R C O U N T R I E S O F PA R T I C U L A R C O N C E R N ( C P C ) 45