Syria minorities need equality in constitution: minister

Syria's future constitution should guarantee equality and inclusion for all religious minorities to help stem emigration, Social Affairs and Labour Minister Hind Kabawat said Tuesday.

“We have to have a new constitution, which includes everybody, and everybody is equal under the law,” Kabawat told AFP.

Kabawat is the only woman and only Christian in the Islamist transition government headed by Ahmed al-Sharaa after the 2024 fall of former president Bashar al-Assad. Syria's transition parliament has the task of drawing up a new constitution.

Syria is a majority Sunni Muslim country with Christian, Alawite, Druze, Ismaili and Kurdish minorities. Experts say the number of Christians has fallen from around one million before the civil war began in 2011 to about 300,000.

Kabawat said Christian departures began long before Assad's fall and had accelerated since the Hama massacres in the 1980s. Asked whether emigration had sped up since Assad's fall, she said Syrians from different communities were still leaving.

“They're worried, and they don't know what kind of government this is,” she said, adding that the government needed to do more to show it was inclusive.

Kabawat is in Rome to meet Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday with around 20 Muslim and Christian officials from the Arab world.