Syrias new leaders using Islamic law to rebuild Assads police

Syria’s new authorities are using Islamic teachings to train a fledgling police force, a move officers say aims to instill a sense of morality as they race to fill a security vacuum after dismantling ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s notoriously corrupt and brutal security forces.Police they brought into Damascus from their former rebel enclave in the northwestern region of Idlib are asking applicants about their beliefs and focusing on Islamic sharia law in the brief training they offer recruits, according to five senior officers and application forms seen by Reuters.Ensuring stability and winning the trust of people across Syria will be crucial for the Sunni Muslim Islamists to cement their rule.But the move to put religion at the center of policing risks seeding new rifts in a diverse country awash with guns after 13 years of civil war and alienating foreign governments they have been trying to woo, regional analysts warn.“There are many Syrians who will find this concerning,” said Aron Lund, a fellow at Century International, a Middle East-focused think tank, when asked about Reuters’ findings.

“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.”The religious foundations of the police training are also making Western governments wonder how big a role Islam might play in Syria’s constitution, which the former rebel faction now in power plans to revise, said one diplomat, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.“It’s not a good sign, but it also depends on how strictly it will be implemented,” the diplomat told Reuters.Syria’s de facto leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has sought to reassure Western officials and Middle Eastern governments worried about their own Islamist movements that his faction has renounced its former ties to al Qaeda and will r...