Armed men came for Mohamad and his father on March 7 last year, forcing them face down on the floor of their apartment in the Syrian city of Jableh while they pleaded for their lives. The gunmen eventually left with cash and belongings. The family left with something harder to shake — the knowledge that being Alawite in post-Assad Syria had become a reason to be targeted, not protected.
Nine months of moving between houses followed before Mohamad, 20, and his uncle Salman flew to Amsterdam on tourist visas and asked for asylum. Within weeks, their claim was rejected. European authorities determined they were not personally at risk.
“Do we have to arrive dead or missing a limb for them to take our claim seriously?” Mohamad said, asking that only his surname be used to protect relatives still in Syria.
His case is not exceptional. It has become the pattern. According to the European Union Asylum Agency, 27,687 of 38,407 Syrian asylum decisions made across Europe in 2025 were negative — a success rate of 28 percent, compared with 90 percent the year before. In February of this year, only 19 percent of Syrian applications succeeded. The collapse in approval rates coincides precisely with the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 and the political calculation across European governments that Syria’s war is over and its people can go home.
Read also: US-Israel Month-Long Iran Offensive Brings Guns To Streets
The problem is that Syria’s war being over and Syria being safe are not the same thing, and for minority communities the distance between those two propositions has been measured in bodies. Since Assad’s fall, Alawites, Druze and Kurds have faced deadly violence from armed groups operating in the new political vacuum. President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government has struggled to bring the fractured country under central control, and its promises to protect minorities have repeatedly collided with the reality of attacks that the new authorities have been unable or unwilling to prevent.
Reuters documented 18 rejections of individuals and families from Syrian minority groups — Alawite, Druze, Kurdish, Christian and Shia — across Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands. The rejections cited insufficient personal evidence of risk, accounts deemed too general or inconsistent, or the argument that the applicant’s specific region was not affected by violence targeting their community. The EU’s own guidance on Syrian claims, released in December, acknowledges that Alawites, Druze and Kurds face persecution — but specifies that cases must be assessed individually, a requirement that in practice has become a mechanism for rejection.
“The problem is how the guidance is being used,” said Nando Sigona, professor of International Migration and Forced Displacement at the University of Birmingham. “Some governments appear to be translating ‘changed circumstances’ into a presumption of safety that the evidence does not support — especially for minority groups. The speed of the shift suggests this is not just a legal reassessment, but part of a broader move toward a more restrictive reading of refugee protection across Europe.”
Read also: Iran Warns U.S. Against Ground Invasion As Talks Open
Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees rejected the asylum claim of Rana Izouli, a Kurdish woman who fled fighting in northeastern Syria in 2023 with her now 11-year-old daughter, saying there were insufficient reports about how the new Syrian government treated Kurdish women and that her region was still administered by Kurds. The statistical picture behind her individual rejection tells the broader story: in Germany last year, the asylum success rate for Alawites was 20 percent, for Kurds 11.8 percent, and for Druze 9.1 percent.
Emad Obeid, a 48-year-old Druze illustrator and anti-Assad activist from Sweida who had given years of his life to the cause of the revolution, arrived in the Netherlands in 2023 and applied for asylum in February 2024. His claim was frozen while authorities reassessed Syria’s situation. While it sat in limbo, his maternal cousins were killed in clashes between Druze and Bedouin fighters in July. His wife and two children still in Sweida do not leave the house after 6 p.m. His 18-year-old son has stopped going to university out of fear.
“I feel total disappointment and anger, because I gave my life for what I thought was revolution and now that this revolution won, they destroyed my city and killed my family and friends,” he said.
Dutch immigration authorities wrote in their decision to freeze his claim that Druze were not considered a risk group and that Obeid had not demonstrated he would personally face danger if returned.
European Commissioner Magnus Brunner told Reuters the situation in Syria remained “highly challenging” and that all applications were assessed individually. Dutch VVD lawmaker Ulysse Ellian said it was now possible for Syrians from certain minority groups to return safely and that doing so was “crucial” to reducing pressure on the Netherlands’ asylum system.
Claire Mayne, the lawyer representing Mohamad’s family, offered a different reading of what the case files show. “We see authorities trying to find enough reasons to reject people,” she said.
Syria’s Ministry of Information said the government was firmly committed to protecting all Syrian communities. It acknowledged that violations by state-affiliated individuals had occurred in Sweida but attributed them to long-standing local tensions and external interference.