Syria's Christians: Persecution, Destruction, and--Resurrection

While under immense pressure by the Islamist régime in Damascus and largely ignored by Western humanitarians, the plight of Syria's Christians is a testament to the human spirit

This is part two of this week’s reporting on stuff legacy media largely ignores: the plight of Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities, courtesy of Bishop Jacques Mourad, who briefly appeared in Germany to inform his fellow bishops.

In many ways, the below posting might serve you well as a reminder of the situation we’re talking about:

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

All non-English content below comes to you in my translation, with emphases, and [snark] added.

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The Fear of Religious Minorities

The Archbishop of Homs warns against the Islamist plans of the new rulers in Syria.

By Anette Zoch, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 11 March 2025 [source]

The Syrian people experienced the fall of dictator Bashar al-Assad as liberation, as a dream finally coming true, says Jacques Mourad, the Syrian Catholic Archbishop of Homs. But three months after the transitional government took power, the initial joy has given way to fear, especially among the religious minorities. Reports of massacres of Alawites have caused international outrage. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights now speaks of more than 1,400 dead.

‘How happy we were when prisoners were freed and the prisons emptied,’ says Mourad. ‘But the days passed and the prisons filled up again, especially with Alawites.’ In the course of summary trials, people were arbitrarily arrested without the right to defence and sometimes even executed. The bishop speaks of a ‘terrible crime’ against the Alawites—and of the growing fear among Christians in Syria.

‘Unfortunately, there is a huge gap between the official rhetoric and the reality on the ground.’

On Tuesday, the priest travelled to Steinfeld Monastery in the Eifel region to give his German Catholic confreres meeting there a first-hand report on the situation of Christians in the Middle East. Before the civil war began, it is estimated that around 1.5 million Christians lived in Syria; today there are only 300,000. The situation is similar in other countries in the Middle East [what happened to them?], where Christians are increasingly being pushed back [let’s pause here for a moment and ask: where did the 1.2m missing Christians go?]

According to Mourad, there is a strong desire among the current leadership in Syria for a purely Islamic country [meant is: Islamist; it means ethnic and religious cleansing of the ‘infidels’: Arabs represent(ed) some 80-85% of Syria’s pre-civil war population of 24m; much has changed since 2011, and Wikipedia, citing the CIA World Factbook, gives 20.4m inhabitants as of July 2021; in terms of religions, some 74% are said to be Sunni and 13% Shia moslems, with the remainder being Christians (10%) and Druze (3%); about a quarter of the remaining c. 20m people are not Sunni: we’re looking at the systematic, mob-like persecution of 5m people: a ‘test’ for Western—or anyone’s—humanitarianism, if there ever was one]. However, this does not do justice to the diversity of the country. ‘Unfortunately, there is a huge gap between the official rhetoric of the current rulers and the reality on the ground,’ said Mourad. They are trying to impose Sharia law as the basis for the new legislation.

Mourad has been Archbishop of Homs since 2023. The diocese belongs to the Syrian Catholic Patriarchate of Antioch, and the Syrian Catholic Church is united with Rome. This means that the liturgy and rite may appear orthodox, but the church defines itself as Catholic in the sense of Rome and recognises the Pope as its head.

Jacques Mourad was born in Aleppo, which was once considered a Christian stronghold but now has fewer than 20,000 Christians [before 2011, Aleppo was home to 2.3m inhabitants, of whom 80% (c. 1.84m) were moslem, with the remainder being mostly Christians (Wikipedia cites 12.1%, or c. 276,000): if ‘fewer than 20,000’ of them remain today, what happened to the other 90+ percent of Christians?]. He studied theology and philosophy at the Holy Spirit University in Kaslik in Lebanon. The 56-year-old became world-famous when he was kidnapped and abducted by the Islamic State terrorist militia in 2015. At the time, Mourad was living as a monk in the Mar Elian monastery near the village of al-Qaryatain, where he also worked as a priest and where Christians and Muslims lived together peacefully. The monastery was also known for its interfaith work.

‘The fear of renewed infiltration from Syria by IS is great in Iraq.’

IS terrorists held him captive for five months and tortured him. IS finally allowed him to return to al-Qaryatain, but in the meantime it was under IS rule. With the help of Muslim friends, he finally managed to flee the IS territory. The 5th century Mar Elian Monastery was destroyed by IS and recaptured by the Syrian army in 2016. It has since been rebuilt under the direction of Jacques Mourad [click on the link and read the piece].

Fears are also growing among Iraq’s Christians that the country will once again be infiltrated by IS from Syria, said Paderborn’s Archbishop and Middle East Commissioner of the Bishops’ Conference, Udo Markus Bentz: ‘The fear of a renewed infiltration from Syria by IS is great in Iraq, especially when the new rulers in Damascus gradually begin to open the prisons filled with IS fighters.’ Europe must therefore support Iraq in the fight against Islamism [the EU is currently doing the exact opposite by supporting the Islamist régime in Damascus].

Mourad wrote about his time in IS captivity in the book ‘A Monk Held Hostage’. Jihadists had asked him to convert to Islam with a knife to his throat, Mourad once told Vatican News. But he drew strength from prayer: ‘I cannot forget the strength and courage that allowed me to look these jihadists in the face and convey the love of Jesus to them,’ said Mourad. His calmness and composure deeply unsettled the prison guards, said Mourad: ‘They wondered how it was possible for a prisoner to smile, and even I couldn’t explain where I got the strength to do so. As soon as I started praying the rosary, all the pain and fear disappeared.’

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Bits and Pieces from Above-Linked Content

I’ll add a few choice excerpts from the main linked content above to speak more about the plight of Syrians, and we’ll begin with the piece entitled ‘The rebirth of the Mar Elian Monastery’ by Gianni Valente (via Agenzia Fides):

In August 2015, when the black flags of the Caliphate flew over much of Syria, the militiamen of the self-proclaimed Islamic State sowed ruin and devastation in the ancient Syrian monastery of Mar Elian. The jihadists of Daesh had brutally desecrated the same tomb of the Saint…

This Christian story of [the monastery’s] rebirth is told by a short and intense account written by Father Jacques Mourad [who] had endured long months of captivity, first in solitary confinement, then with more than 150 Christians from Quaryatayn, also taken hostage in the territories then conquered by Daesh…

Last August [2021], the church, which had been set on fire by the jihadists, was also repaired and provided with a new altar: a restoration that was carried out without completely removing the carbon black from the walls, so that even in this place of worship and prayer, visible traces of this stage of recent history remain. Young Muslim friends also did their best to carry out the final preparations together. Finally, on September 9, the feast day of Mar Elian, more than 350 people arrived by bus from Damascus, Nabek, Homs, Sadad and Maskane, as well as many Syrian Catholic priests from all over Syria. The inauguration ceremony, presided over by Youhanna Jihad Battah, Syrian Catholic Archbishop of Damascus, also saw the participation, as a special guest, of Mor Timotheos Matta al Khoury, Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Homs [looks like a fair approximation of Assad’s Syria: far from perfect, but at least not homicidal bordering on genocide]…

[Jacques Mourad] ‘After the long Stations of the Cross lived by the Syrian people’, remarks the monk of Deir Mar Musa, ‘it was not easy to imagine being able to live the joy of such an encounter. There is certainly a force that exceeds our human limits.’

For more insights into Jacques Mourad’s story, we may turn to a Vatican News piece by Fabio Colagrande, entitled, ‘The story of a priest held hostage by Isis’, from summer 2019:

Father Jacques moves slowly, supporting himself with a cane…His limp and slow pace anticipates his story. A bright smile lights up his face, the same smile he offered the Isis terrorists who kept him prisoner for five months in Syria in 2015, before his daring escape…Today he lives in Iraqi Kurdistan, in Suleymanya, in order to be close to the refugees coming from his country. When in Rome, he stays at the Don Gnocchi Centre where he receives treatment for his back which was severely damaged during the long weeks of detention.

‘I always carry with me the people I met during those months: prisoners, jihadists, they are all in my prayers and in my heart’, he tells us in Italian, the language he learned during the months of rehabilitation here in Rome. ‘I believe that the merciful God always finds a way to help everyone, and even my jailers can encounter justice and receive the light of the Holy Spirit’…

Saved Because Witnesses of Peace

He was kidnapped on May 21 in the monastery of Mar Elian in Qaryatayn, where he was parish priest. After the first three months of imprisonment in Raqqa, he was transferred to a prison near Palmira, where he found two hundred and fifty Christians from his community. A group of jihadist leaders visited them. ‘These five men from Isis took me to a small room and their leader read me a statement from the Caliph al Baghdadi, the leader of Isis, addressed to the Christians of Qaryatein. It was a long series of laws for us Christians living under the power of the Islamic State’. Father Jacques learned with surprise that his community would be taken back to Quaryatein. There, they would be in a sort of open-air prison and be subjected to a series of heavy prohibitions. However, they would be allowed to celebrate Holy Mass. ‘This news was an unexpected miracle for me’, he recalls with emotion. ‘I didn't think I could go back to celebrating the Eucharist and receiving Communion. For me it was a great gift of mercy from God.’ During the conversation with the jihadist leaders, Father Mourad tried to make sure his faithful would indeed return and be able to stay in their homes. He asked the terrorists why the Caliphate was taking them back to Qaryatein. ‘The jihadist chief told me it was because we Christians of this community had not taken up arms against the Muslims. It was an answer that struck me very much and made me understand many things. I understood above all, that those who decide not to practice violence can, by their choice, change the attitude of those who are used to taking up arms. We were saved thanks to our vocation as Christians, as witnesses of peace’…

It seems like a provocation to ask a Catholic monk, who has been kidnapped and tortured by Islamic terrorists, whether, after that experience, he still believes in dialogue with Muslims. But Father Jacques is a friend and spiritual disciple of Jesuit Father Paolo Dall’Oglio who created the community of Mar Musa in the country precisely to promote inter-religious dialogue and peace. Father Paolo was kidnapped in Syria in 2013 and has never been heard from since…

‘Trusting in dialogue is a principle’, he insists, ‘it is not tied to the attitude of others. Moreover, we Syrian Christians have lived alongside Muslims for more than 1400 years. We have a history of living life in common with them. Behind current terrorism there is a political network that uses everything to do evil. It is not a network inspired directly by Islam but by a political project [now, what political project—among them are certainly the EU, Israel, and the US—might that be?] As Christians we must stop this way of thinking, inspired by certain propaganda, according to which every Muslim is a terrorist’, he adds. ‘We really need more humility and clarity in our lives and in our relationships with others. We need to read the Gospel deeply in order to live it properly…

Despite the experience of jihadists holding a knife to his throat and demanding he convert to Islam, this Syrian-Catholic priest describes his imprisonment as an extraordinary opportunity for spiritual growth. In the diary he kept during that time, he writes about the inner peace, energy, and serenity that came from prayer. ‘I received gifts from God at the very moment I was living my imprisonment’, he says. ‘I cannot forget the strength and courage that allowed me to look these jihadists in the eye and transmit to them the love of Jesus. In those situations, God gave me the gift of a smile, something that put my jailers in difficulty. They wondered how it was possible for a prisoner to smile. I cannot explain where I got the strength to do so.’

I’ll interrupt the flow here because I think it’s important to drive home one point: whatever one may think about spirituality, reading these lines suggests—solace and inner peace. Moreover, these lines, above all, explain pretty well why the notion of homo œconomicus is a fallacy, if there ever was one: people frequently act in ways that cannot be explained by taking recourse to the material world only. This is the insight gleaned from the above account of Jacques Mourad’s plight, of the plight of the other religious minorities of Syria, and, ultimately, of the Gospel.

Speaking of religious minorities, esp. Christians, I’m reproducing some more from the Vatican News piece as its content is omitted from the above legacy media piece (for reasons I cannot possibly fathom other than incompetence or wilful blindness):

Silence on the Plight of Christians

Father Jacques’ concern for the fate of Syrian refugees is connected to his fears for a Middle East that is progressively emptying itself of its Christian population, while the world watches in silence. ‘It is not possible for the Middle East to live without Christians’, he affirms. ‘On a symbolic level it is very dangerous because it is a situation that touches the roots of Christianity: the Church cannot grow, continue its history, without the Churches of the Middle East’ [I’m personally unsure about that proposition, but I certainly understand it given what Jacques Mourad has gone through]. ‘We have two responsibilities today: the first is towards all Christian refugees living in Europe or in the USA. There must be an official canonical structure that attests to their existence. The second is to break this silence on the flight of Christians from the Middle East. It is the responsibility of the heads of the Eastern Churches, of our patriarchs and bishops as well. They should do everything to protect and support their people. What is being done for the Christians of the Middle East is not enough. More important than giving them food and drink is restoring their dignity, offering them a life worth living. And they still don’t have that.’

Bottom Lines

Whatever one thinks of religion in general and Christianity in particular, one cannot but marvel at the faith and resilience of these poor souls.

As always, legacy media stumbles and falls on its face, for the reproduction of these two (of many) news items, the selective non-follow-up on things Jacques Mourad says, is astounding and inane, but it is hardly surprising at this point.

The End of Christianity in the Middle East

Moreover, let’s not forget that Jacques Mourad spoke specifically about all religious minorities whose members are persecuted with a vengeance by the Islamist régime coveted by the US, Israel, and Türkiye, as well as supported by the EU (what a disgrace).

On a somewhat more general level, I suppose that the above account of Jacques Mourad also serves as a powerful reminder of the nature of Christianity in the fact of persecution and oppression which is quite likely not that different from two thousand years ago.

While I have no way of ascertaining anything for certain, if the account by Jacques Mourad is even partially accurate (which none of us knows), what you can see clearly, though, are two key aspects that beg anyone’s consideration:

First, faith in Jesus Christ has the potential to make individuals resist even the worst kinds of abuses; Jacques Mourad is by far not the only Christian who, when asked to recant by his abusers, did not. The sordid history of other totalitarian régimes across the 20th century provides, sadly, more than ample evidence for millions of dead Christians (I’ve seen this piece claiming some 26m killed Christians). This, it appears to me, is the true legacy of Jesus Christ and his disciples who, under quite comparable circumstances, did not budge either. At the very least, spare a thought (or prayer) for the kind of courage that it takes every day as a persecuted and much-abused Christian in the Middle East.

Their consideration brings me to my second point: Father—now Bishop—Jacques Mourad and his fellow Christians of all denominations elected to remain in their country. Unlike millions of young, mostly male moslems who trekked to the West, and irrespective of what one personally thinks about religious belief, one cannot but admire the kind of courage the Middle Eastern Christians, children and adults alike, display: instead of leaving, they stayed; when beaten, tortured, and having their places of worship destroyed, they rolled up their sleeves and rebuilt them.

And if that isn’t living proof of passion, torture, death, and—crucially—resurrection in the mould of Jesus Christ, I don’t know what else could possibly be.

Godspeed.