But at a church in Damascus’s historic centre, surrounded by some 500 faithful who were singing psalms on Christmas Eve on Tuesday, she could breathe a sigh of relief.
“It wasn’t easy to come together in the current circumstances and to joyfully pray, but thank God, we did it,” Latifa told AFP at mass at the capital’s Syriac Orthodox cathedral of Saint George.
Syria’s rulers who toppled Assad’s government on December 8 have since sought to assure religious and ethnic minorities that their rights would be upheld.
But for some in the Christian community of several hundred thousands, the promises made by the new Islamist leadership have done little to soothe their fears in a country scarred by years of civil war.
Hundreds took to the streets of Damascus on Tuesday to demand their rights be respected, after a Christmas tree was set ablaze in a town in central Syria.
A video on social media showed hooded fighters setting fire to the tree in the Christian-majority town of Suqaylabiyah, near Hama.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said they were foreign jihadists. A local religious leader from Syria’s victorious Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) condemned the torching.
At the Saint George Cathedral, Latifa said that even though the road towards a new Syria may seem “tumultuous or uncertain”, the future can be better “if we walk hand in hand”.
‘We don’t belong’
Before the war began in 2011, Syria was home to about one million Christians, or about five percent of the population, according to analyst Fabrice Balanche.
