Legacy Media Pays a Visit to Maaloula, Syria, Home to the Country's Oldest Christian Communities

Signs and wonders? I doubt it, for the below piece appeared in tabloid/legacy media, and the premier outlets so far refuse to countenance any issues connecting HTS to religious minorities

In many, mainly sad, ways, this is a follow-up to the post below:

The End of Christianity in the Middle East

For whatever reason, tabloid media in Central Europe is reporting on the plight of Christian communities in post-Assad Syria, and while I have no way of corroborating the information presented below, I consider it all credible enough to warrant consideration.

That said, translation, emphases, and [snark] mine. Plus the sigh.

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‘But God Alone.’—Who Will Protect Christians from the Islamists Now?

Maaloula, just over an hour north of Damascus, is a legendary city. The language of Jesus is still spoken here.

Via 20 Minuten/Heute, 27 Dec. 2024 [source/source]

‘I don't want to talk about the current situation’—that's what the reporter from 20 Minuten hears almost everywhere in Maaloula [Wikipedia link]. And that is understandable to a certain extent.

After all, the small town in Syria, where Aramaic—the language of Jesus—is still spoken in everyday life, has been in a quandary since the fall of Bashar al-Assad: occupied and devastated by the terrorists of the Islamic State in 2013, it was liberated and protected by the [Assad] regime in 2014. Now the protectors have fallen and the Islamists of the HTS militia are in power.

‘The same people who attacked us eleven years ago are the ones who are now ruling Syria’, says Father Fadi Barki from the monastery of St Sergius and St Bacchus. ‘Of course we are afraid accordingly.’ [he speaks of the ‘liberators’ celebrated by Western media] The priest can't talk any longer, he has to go to a funeral in a neighbouring village.

In a village shop, the owner initially declines to speak, saying he doesn’t want to talk about politics. A few delicious black teas later, Fasih becomes more talkative.

‘Don’t believe everything that is said about Assad’

The 50-year-old raves about the time before the civil war, when up to ten buses full of tourists from all over the world came to Maaloula every day:

Before 2011, many Iranians also came here. And Assad himself was often here, visiting our monasteries and churches with former US President Jimmy Carter and former Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, for example.

Today, only small groups still travel to the famous site (see box), the last of which came from China and Russia in September. ‘I hope that more tourists will visit us again with the new government.’

Sunday mass in Maaloula: among Christians, fear is rampant.

When asked about his opinion of Assad, Fasih clicks his tongue and shakes his head—whether out of disapproval of the regime or because of the question remains unclear.

His older brother Amin, who drops by for a cup of tea, does not like to openly criticise the old dictatorial regime. The Sednaya torture prison, which has now been opened, shows that Assad is ‘probably mentally ill’, says the 58-year-old. Nevertheless:

You shouldn’t believe everything that is now being said about Assad. And there was more security in Syria under him.

So Far, No Visit from HTS

To date, the new rulers have not visited Maaloula, ‘the only village in the region’, says Amin. This is more worrying than reassuring, a bad omen, he believes. He wants a secular state, as most of Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities are demanding.

He distrusts the Islamists from painful experience. ‘IS destroyed our shop in 2013, partly because we were selling wine’, says Amin (58):

We had to flee and rebuild everything when we returned. I lost over a million dollars in total. Only one of us four brothers was able to get married, the others had no money left.

Armed Gangs: ‘You're a Christian? Then you’re rich’

A third man enters the shop. He has just almost been kidnapped on his way back from Damascus, he says excitedly. Men on two motorcycles had stopped him on a side road and questioned him.

They asked where I was from. When I said I was from Maaloula, they said:

‘Oh, are you a Christian? So you’re rich then!’

He replied that he wouldn’t be driving such an old car if he was rich.

‘They got off their motorbikes and I saw that one of them was carrying a gun. So I stepped on the gas—and they shot at my car.’

Like shop owner Fasih and his brother, the man does not want to be photographed—but insists that a bullet hole in the hood of his car be recorded, adding:

They weren’t good people. They weren’t from the HTS. But armed gangs like that make our lives hell not only at night, but now during the day too.

No, he will not press charges. Because: ‘There are no police in the area.’

Against this backdrop, the question is obvious: who will protect the Christians of Maaloula in future? All three men agree: ‘God alone.’

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Bottom Lines

As I said before, I don’t know if that story is true. For all I know, I deem it credible enough, for that reporter, Ann Guenter, working for Swiss-based tabloid 20 Minuten, recently did a piece on the notorious Sednaya Prison in Damascus.

That said, given the notoriety of fake news coming from legacy media outlets about the jail—just consider CNN falling (?) for a jailer/torturer (?) masquerading as a prisoner—an Ms. Guenter’s piece falling largely in that category, it’s quite hard to know. Yet, the concluding sentence of her above-linked ‘behind the scenes’ (sic) ‘reporting™’ is telling enough to cast doubt; writing about allegations of torture and worse, Ms. Guenter writes that ‘none of this cannot be confirmed independently, but it is certainly credible’.

That said, the piece about Maaloula is a bit different, and I think it has nothing to do with the owner of 20 Minuten’s parent company, Tamedia. Pietro Supino is a wealthy man with no obvious connections and or sentimentalities about anything, with perhaps the exception of him being of Italian stock.

My best guess is that Ms. Guenter heard/knew about Maaloula from a local in Damascus and decided to spend a day going there and back. In her piece, we do find the below-reproduced info box:

Maaloula is located 50 kilometres north of Damascus and is known far beyond the borders of Syria. Not only because one of the oldest Christian communities in the world lives here and Aramaic, the language of Jesus, is still spoken in everyday life. But also because of its churches and monasteries, which date back to antiquity [check out her piece—click here—for some images].

Its shrines include the Greek Orthodox women’s monastery of St Thekla and the Greek Catholic Melkite monastery of St Sergius and Bacchus. Here, the Islamists destroyed icons, Bibles, missals, vestments, and prayer books in 2013. They stole the most valuable sacred artefacts and sold them on the illegal art market with the help of Western backers [personally, a piece about the illegal art market and the ‘help of Western backers’ would be a better choice, but then again, given that the owners of Western legacy media might be somehow involved in that, I suppose we won’t get a piece about this topic before too long, at least not from within corporate media].

The spiritual significance of Maaloula was also the reason why the jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) occupied and devastated the city.

Before the civil war and before the IS occupation, Maaloula was home to around 5,000 inhabitants; today there are around 1,000, most of whom are Christians.

I’d also add, for good measure, that it time will tell if the new rulers—and I don’t mean HTS, which is clearly taking orders from ‘someone™’ else (which doesn’t mean their gangs wouldn’t take matters into their own hands, too)—will permit the small Christian communities to live on. If I’d be a betting man, I’d think not, if only because HTS and their ilk are batshit crazy Islamists.

Time will tell; in the meantime, please consider including the Christians of Maaloula in your thoughts and prayers.