Five senior police officers in Damascus told Reuters on Thursday they were using sharia to “instill a sense of morality” in new recruits during their brief training period. The officers insisted they were not training the police to impose sharia on citizens.
“There are many Syrians who will find this concerning. Not just minorities — Christians, Alawites, Druze — but also quite a lot of Sunni Muslims in places like Damascus and Aleppo, where you have a fairly large secular, cosmopolitan population that’s not interested in religious law,” Century International think tank fellow Aron Lund told Reuters. Many of the new police in Damascus have been imported from Idlib, the province that served as the insurgents’ stronghold and launch pad for their lightning December offensive against the Assad regime. (Read More)
