Defending Islam, dying for Islam: What the suicide attack on the church of Mar Elias portends for Syria - ABC Religion & Ethics

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The suicide attack on Christians at prayer in the Greek Orthodox Church of Mar Elias (Saint Elijah) in Damascus on Sunday, 22 June 2025, left 25 dead and 63 wounded. World leaders were quick to condemn the attack, as were Syria's state authorities, who vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice.
But condemnations offer little to Christian Syrians. Like Christians across the region, they feel increasingly unwelcome — religiously unwelcome — in lands where they've dwelt for 2,000 years.
The group claiming responsibility for the attack is a branch of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which issued a statement explaining its motive. In March 2025, the community of Mar Elias had driven away its members who had sought access to the church to call people to Islam. The group, a kind of Salafism, aims to purify the lands of Islam of non-Muslim elements through aggressive preaching, but if blocked from doing so, they'll resort to violence to achieve the goal.
Christian Syrians, though shocked, deeply disappointed and fearful, are not surprised. They view the attack on Mar Elias through the lens of a long history of religiously inspired hostility towards Christianity in the region — including the well-known genocide against the Armenians and lesser-known genocides against the Assyrian and Chaldean Christians under the Ottoman Empire.
Blood spatters cover some damaged artwork inside the Mar Elias Orthodox Church following a suicide bombing on 22 June 2025 in Damascus, Syria. (Photo by Ali Haj Suleiman / Getty Images)
In October 2024, Pope Francis canonised 'the martyrs of Damascus', eleven Christians of varied origins, all of them residents of a monastery in Damascus, who in 1860 were set upon and killed, specifically out of hatred for their faith, in a context of widespread massacre of Christians.
The latest chapter of this history opened with the rise of ISIS, which blew up churches and monasteries in Syria and subjected Christians to a slave-like status. Countless Christians paid with their life — some apparently by crucifixion — for refusing to renounce their trust in Christ. ISIS also attacks Muslims who reject its creed, but the cross enrages ISIS, making Christian sites high-priority targets their work of purifying the lands of Islam of non-Muslim elements.
Who are the true 'martyrs'?
Despite the claims of President Ahmed al-Sharaa that Syria is a pluralistic society, Christians — and others — have reason to doubt his words. The new regime has not clearly extricated itself from jihadist affiliates, proving unable or unwilling to protect Alawite and Druze communities from attacks earlier this year, or to denounce extremist preachers who make sense of the harassment of Christians by speaking of non-Muslims as 'a blight on the purity of Islam'.
Particularly worrying for Christians is the fact that state authorities have not referred to the victims as 'martyrs' or invoked God's mercy upon them. This might sound trivial to Western ears, but it speaks volumes to Syrian ones. Not invoking God's mercy on the dead implies they have no value in God's eyes. In practice, Muslims invoke God's mercy on the dead irrespective of their religion, but the official position is that one is to invoke God's mercy only on the Muslim dead.
In other words, the new regime would alienate its base if it spoke of Christians killed last Sunday as 'martyrs', worthy of God's mercy. But not doing so sends the message to Christians that they have less or even no value under a regime that seeks to establish itself on the rituals of Islam.
In short, if Christians are martyrs, then Christianity is true, and in the current context of Syria, given the nature of the regime and the sentiments of its supporters, only Islam can be true.
In contrast, last February, when a car bomb in the northeastern city of Munbij took the lives of twenty Muslim citizens, the president referred to the victims as 'martyrs'. What are Syrian Christians to think? They're frustrated not only over the lack of security. More fundamentally, they feel the wider society doesn't see Christians as a valued part of its overall good. Patriarch John X, in his sermon at the funeral for the victims of the attack, berated the state for failing to refer to the victims as martyrs who died 'in devotion to both religion and nation'.
But the group claiming responsibility for the attack sees its suicide bombers as the true martyrs. In Islam, as in other traditions, martyrdom takes many forms. Traditionally, one is a martyr by dying in defence of Islam, but one has to meet certain conditions for one's death to be deemed a martyrdom. In particular, one's intention has to be sound. One isn't a martyr if one dies in defence of Islam to earn a glorious reputation for oneself, only secondarily for the sake of Islam.
Defending Islam — but from whom, and why?
So, if martyrdom means dying in defence of Islam, why the martyrdom operation in Syria where Islam is not under threat? In contrast to the Assad regime, the new state actively backs Islam, including the right of Muslims to express their faith in state institutions and in public in general. And why are they targeting Christians, who hardly represent a threat to Islam in Syria?
ISIS now deems the new state under Ahmed al-Sharaa as a threat to Islam for his willingness to associate with Western (infidel) regimes — such as France and the United States — and with Arab regimes like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which are seen by ISIS as apostates for their ties to the West. By attacking Christians, ISIS sends the message that it is doing what the new rulers are not doing: disassociating ( baraa' ) from all that is not Islam by attacking all that is not Islam.
In other words, by attacking Christians, ISIS seeks to highlight two things:
that al-Sharaa has turned his back on his jihadist convictions, making him unworthy to rule over the lands of Islam;
that al-Sharaa has turned his back on his jihadist convictions, making him unworthy to rule over the lands of Islam; that ISIS remains true to its jihadist convictions, willing to die in defence of Islam in battle against infidels (Christians).
ISIS is claiming that it is the last bastion of true Islam, unsullied by any association with infidels and apostates, alone worthy of leading the community of Muslims. In this sense, Christians are collateral damage in a larger battle between ISIS and the new Syria.
While Western political analysts would leave it there — seeing the suicide attack as a weapon ISIS uses against a superior enemy — it would be a mistake to neglect the theological angle. Two points need to be made in that regard.
First, the existence of Christianity represents a latent threat to the truth of Islam. (Judaism represented a similar threat in medieval Christendom.) How is it that Christian Arabs are still Christians after so many years of living under Islam? This specifically religious concern has only intensified in the modern period when school textbooks across the wider region — along with the rhetoric of Islamist movements, notably the Muslim Brotherhood — reduce citizenship and national belonging to being Muslim.
Syria's interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa meets with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace on 7 May 2025 in Paris, France. (Photo by Tom Nicholson / Getty Images)
Second, why are so many Muslim youth ready to enlist for martyrdom operations against both non-Muslims and also Muslims whose faith falls short of the ISIS creed? Traditionally, defence of Islam meant defending a moral order that Islam was understood as guaranteeing. Thus, one was deemed a martyr for dying in defence of the lands of Islam as a moral order that preserved justice for all, not for attacking non-Muslims in the lands of Islam.
However, only in recent decades has this traditional view been radically altered. A key trigger has been the penetration of a Western-led globalism into the lands of Islam. Muslim youth, it is felt, are now more attuned to Western culture and Western ideas than to the teachings of Islam. True or not, that's the perception in terrorist circles. Islam itself is under existential threat since it no longer has dominion over people's minds, even in the lands of Islam.
In a world where the number of Muslims approaches two billion, such a view is incredibly naïve, but it generates a sense of despair over Islam that inspires youth to commit suicide — to die and go to heaven where Islam has dominion rather than stay in a world where Islam no longer holds sway.
Oddly, death becomes the goal of religion, departing a world that rejects Islam. But the adherent has to show that they are dying for Islam , and there's no better way of doing so than 'fighting' Christian infidels at prayer in a martyrdom operation.
The theological basis of a new Syria
The attack on Mar Elias recalls ISIS attacks on churches in Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, which aimed to discredit the new Iraq as a pluralistic society where all are religiously valued, destabilising society and undermining confidence in the country's future.
Syria need not end up like Iraq, but that requires the state to do two things:
deploy its security to protect the religious sites of all communities;
deploy its security to protect the religious sites of all communities; revise a religious curriculum in state schools that suggests that Islam can only be Islam when it has dominion ( haymana ) in society religiously — the new curriculum can affirm both Islam as the true religion and the religious bonds it shares with other communities, countering the idea that they're somehow a foreign presence in the lands of Islam, deprived of God's care and a threat to Islam's truths.
Syria's most urgent need is rebuilding its infrastructure after years of war, but sustainable development can't happen in a highly religious country without a life-giving theological vision. So long as the school curriculum in the wider region implies that Islam is to dominate, rather than be the defender of a moral order where all are equally valued by God, the terrorist call to youth — to prove their worth to God by attacking Christians at prayer — will continue to resonate.
The new regime is staking its credibility on developing a piety-based economy with massive investment especially from Turkey and Saudi Arabia. But more is needed for Syria to succeed — namely, a religious message that all people have equal dignity in God's eyes and that all who are killed unjustly, irrespective of their religious community, are martyrs and thus 'alive with God'.
Only by reconsidering the brand of piety that state education communicates can Syria — and other countries in the wider region — turn the tables on those who confuse death with life and see the purification of the lands of Islam of non-Muslim elements as a way to win God's favour.
Paul L. Heck is Professor of Theology and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. His most recent books are Skepticism in Classical Islam: Moments of Confusion and Political Theology and Islam: From the Birth of Empire to the Modern State.