As seen in Vatican Insider:Christians in Syria: I came into contact with them straight away, on the second day of my umpteenth visit to the land of the revolution which turned into a horrific and ferocious civil war. Yabroud is located just over the Lebanese border. Its mountains seem far away, bare, rocky, solemn peaks crowned by clouds. In order to complete the first leg of the journey which should take me to Damascus, I skirt around the mountainside with a Free Syria Army reinforcement team, above deep and scary, cloud-filled gorges. At sundown, the vast Yabroud plain and Qara further in the distance, appear submerged in glorious sunlight, with cultivated fields and orderly orchards stretching out across it in a carpet-like pattern. But it is the sentinels of the desert; behind them are the endless plains that lead to Damascus; its cliffs and sand make the faraway sky seem cloudy.
This has been the land of Christians for centuries. They have held out against all odds: Crusades and the jihad, poverty and revolutions, fanaticism and indifference. Above all, they escaped the jaws of one unforgivable sin: desperation. On my previous four trips to Syria under rebellion I never paid much attention to the Christian community in the country ruled by Assad. They account for approximately 10-12% of the Syrian population but it is difficult to give precise estimates, as people’s religion is not stated on their personal identification documents. I confess that I saw it as a problem of secondary importance given the tragic abyss which 22 million Syrians, including Sunnis, Alawites, Arabs, Turkmens, Druses and Kurds, found themselves in. Of course I had noticed that the Christians in Free Syrian Army units were rather few. Certainly when I talked about it with the rebels many of their faces dropped just at the mention of them: “Christians have always been closely tied to Bashar out of interest and fear... They are suspicious of us revolutionaries and accuse us of being fundamentalists and fanatics. But in reality they are defending their interests, wealth and the social status they have gained. Fir this reason they see the regime as a safety net and us an unknown.”
But, they added, “there will be no vendettas in Aleppo”, a martyr city and symbol of the revolution that has been split down the middle, with neighbourhoods that have been freed on the one hand and the regime’s strongholds on the other. “There will also be a place for Christians in the new State that we visualise as democratic, pluralistic and multidenominational.”
Syrian Christians have traditionally always supported the Baath party and the nation-State. But they have also done so out of need. They see it as a way of holding back fundamentalism. Their Golden Age was the 1950’s, when they actively participated in the political and parliamentary life of a newly-independent Syria; in the 1954 elections they obtained 16 members of parliament. This was the only democratic election in the country’s entire history.
The emir of the Al Nusra Front group that had taken me hostage for a period of ten days was a good looking Lebanese man with blue eyes who came from the villages on the border to fight the holy war in Syria and settle the score with Hezbollah’s Shiites. Apparently they had carried out a massacre in his village. It was this chain of events that led to the of the moloch that was the Syrian civil war. A monk who was a warrior, just like his young fighters, prayer and war, an ascetic life where there was no room for smiles, food or piety. He would pass by the stable where his group of fighters were living in poor conditions, when it was not yet daylight, as knock on the iron doors with a stick he always carried with him, shouting: “Wake up, mujaheddin. God is calling, it’s prayer time!” He had a clever and cruel look in his eye and he had things all worked out in his mind. When I asked him what future lay ahead for Syria if they managed to get rid of Bashar, he said without hesitation: we will establish the Caliphate here, according to the will of the great and merciful God. Sharia law will reign supreme. But this will only be the beginning... We will then throw all Jews into the sea, conquer Lebanon and overthrow the atheist and corrupt regimes in Jordan, Iraq... and then Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, al-Andalus, Spain and all of God’s lands. And the Caliphate will return to its former glory, in the sacred days when Islam was victorious. I asked him what would happen to Christians in the future Caliphate: they have been living here for centuries, this is their home... They will have a better fate than that of the Alawites, Bashar’s Satanic sect, which we will hunt down and exterminate, right down to the very last man, woman and child. If Christians obey, they will be able to stay here, but they will have to pay a tax, like all dhimmis. As citizens, they will never enjoy the same rights as true believers!
Over the past year, the nature of the Syrian civil war and its players have changed radically. The number of jihadist groups financed by Saudi Arabia and often made up entirely of foreign volunteers, have multiplied and are also stronger. In a land where the Free Syrian Army is no longer, these groups are the real opposition force that stands against the regular army. They have brought with them a fanaticism that was lacking in the first phase of the revolution. They see the regime’s overthrowal as the first phase in the process of re-establishing the Caliphate in a country that is a key player in the Middle East. Approaches to Christians vary: each katiba takes a more or less extremist stance depending on its composition – Chechens, Libyans, Tunisians, Tatars, Saudis and Europeans . Misinformation on both warring sides has given birth to numerous theories and myths. Western newspapers have collected and published terrifying stories about fundamentalist groups killing Christians and allegedly bottling their blood and sending it to the Saudis who finance their groups, to show that they are hard at work in this holy war! There has also been talk of Christian crucifixions based on videos from questionable sources. There are jihadist groups of dubious origin which may have been created or infiltrated by the regime’s secret services to spread confusion and conduct dirty military operations. For example, who shot Fr. Franz van der Lugt in the neck three times ? The Dutch Jesuit priest who agreed to stay in Homs’ old quarter which had been under siege for two years, despite the bombs and the lack of food, to show to the world that he “[did] not see Muslims or Christians” but “above all, human beings”. Was it the fundamentalists or the regular army that killed him to take revenge? Who kidnapped another Jesuit priest, Fr. Paolo Dall’Oglio, founder of the Mar Musa monastery – a place of extraordinary ecumenism where Muslims and Christians pray side by side – over a year ago? Unlike the Christian leaders he had often jad disagreements with, he had chosen to back the revolutionary side right from the start, against a regime which he denounced as corrupt and violent. Here we have a priest and revolutionary free from any contradictions and hypocrisy.
Some are adamant – though there is no confirmation – that Fr. Dall’Oglio was kidnapped by one of the jihad’s most radical groups, ISIL, which controls the territories on the Syria-Iraq border where the Italian Jesuit priest went missing. Dall’Oglio’s revolutionary values are of no importance to these new rebel fanatics in the face of two other capital “sins”: being Western and above all, Christian.
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