Christians are the most persecuted religious group on the planet. More than a dozen die each day for their faith. Although the deadliest place of all for Christians has been and still is Nigeria, some online observers might have concluded, erroneously, that last week it was Syria.

The overthrow of the longtime Assad dictatorship to power only three months ago brought an Islamist government to power in Damascus that has struggled to address the country’s many problems.

On March 6, a new problem arose: a deadly insurgency. Assad regime remnants, which were mostly drawn from the country’s Alawite religious minority, rose up on that day, killing government soldiers and police, civilians and even motorists on the highway who had the wrong license plates. Assad’s supporters targeted cars with “Idlib” governorate license plates because that region is where the opposition Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) political organization ruled until December 2024.

The interim government rushed in forces, some being ambushed along the way by insurgents as the authorities fed in even more troops to quell the uprising. Leading the Alawite rebels were former officers of the disbanded Assad army, some of them war criminals and drug dealers. The government troops included not only Syrians, but tough foreign jihadist fighters, Uyghurs and Chechens, and units that had an unsavory reputation as little more than bandits, rapists and mercenaries used by Turkey against Syrian Kurds in the north.

By the morning of March 8, reputable reports suggested at least 100 dead on each side; by the end of the day, the number had climbed to 1,000 presumed dead. Some recent reports speak of several thousand dead. It is, mostly, Muslim-on-Muslim violence, a bloody Alawite Muslim insurgency suppressed with brute force by the Sunni Muslim authorities who rule Syria. Government troops, at least some of them, responded to the insurgency with their own savagery, killing entire families of Alawites, mostly civilians, moving from town to town and village to village.

ACI Mena, the Register’s sister news agency in the Middle East, reported the first Christian deaths in the conflict on March 8, an Armenian father and son killed on the highway and a young man shot dead in his apartment. On March 9, Syrian Christian activist Ayman Abdel Nour claimed that up to eight Christians may have been killed in the conflict.

Eight people dead may seem like a small number, but it is a disaster for a dwindling, rightfully skittish Syrian Christian community. It is a tiny percentage of the several thousand presumed dead. Details of every Christian martyr’s death are lacking, but several seemed to have been killed by chance, while others may have been targeted because they were Christians. As of this writing, the Wadi al-Nasara (literally “Valley of the Christians”) region of mostly Christian small towns and villages, only a few miles away from the site of the slaughter of Alawites, seems to have been untouched by the violence.

Syria’s Christian leaders have called for peace, reconciliation and an end to the killing.

On March 7, the Latin Bishop of Aleppo, Hanna Jallouf, issued a statement “supporting the Syrian state” against those who seek to destabilize the country and do her ill, a reference to the Assad loyalists. On March 8, the country’s patriarchs of the Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, and Greek Catholic Churches issued a rare joint statement strongly condemning “any act that threatens civil peace” but also condemning “the massacres targeting innocent civilians.”

In contrast to the reality on the ground and the careful words of the Syrian Christian religious leadership, the online clamor has gone in different directions, making it appear as if what has been happening in Syria was “Christians and Alawites being massacred,” if not just a “massacre of hundreds of Christians.” European anti-immigration commentator Peter Imanuelsen (@PeterSweden7), with almost 900,000 followers, asked on @X “why is mainstream media ignoring Christians being slaughtered by the regime in Syria?” His plea was reposted by Elon Musk (219 million followers). The initial tweet had 58 million views.

Instead of a bad-enough reality where a bloody insurgency by pro-Assad Alawite Muslims led to brutal repression and ethnic cleansing against them by anti-Assad Sunni Muslims now in power (with some Christians killed in the crossfire), online influencers presented a misleading image of an anti-Christian pogrom that did not really exist.

Why did they do that? Some are influencers who traffic in outrage and lies. Others are genuine Christians who care for their brethren worldwide but may not fully understand the facts on the ground.

Deceptive online voices amplifying this distorted image of hundreds of Christians being killed in Syria also include supporters of Iran, of the Syrian Kurds opposed to the Damascus government, supporters of Israel, anti-Islamists and pro-Russian voices supporting the overthrown Assad regime. A false claim from a pro-Iranian site in English that the Syrian government had killed a Christian mayor received almost 400,000 impressions.

On the other hand, partisans of Turkey and Qatar, the patrons of the Islamist Damascus government, have tended to play down the massacres completely, emphasizing instead the provocations of the Assad bitter-enders and the hypocrisy of the West when it comes to “minorities.”

And yet while the death toll of Christians in Syria was grotesquely and dangerously exaggerated, there were also real videos of radical Islamists and Jihadists making bloodthirsty claims.

One Algerian Islamist on TikTok claiming to be in Syria called for an end to the Alawites (calling them by an older, pejorative term, Nusayri, meaning “Little Christian”) and then the Christians themselves. It was just one man making threats, but there were also real videos of government troops killing Alawites or boasting of killing them. Syrian government supporters in the diaspora joined in the ghoulishness. Syrian Christians may not have been targeted directly nor slain in large numbers, but the voices of extremism, the threats and the intolerance, were all too real.

By March 9, Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa personally called anti-Assad Alawite journalist Hanadi Zahlout, who lost three brothers in the massacre at Jableh, to express his condolences and promised to hold the perpetrators accountable. Al-Sharaa announced an investigative commission made up of jurists to investigate the events and to punish the guilty.

Veteran Syria observers will be appropriately skeptical, remembering the Assad regime announcing commissions to investigate this or that outrage as a way of covering up crimes and deflecting popular opinion. Many will hope things will be different this time.