Most of the armed conflicts in the Middle East go down to religious confrontation. Syria is a glaring example of this. Christians make up around 10 percent of country's 20-million population.
According to the Syrian Patriarch of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church Gregory Laham, 450,000 Syrian Christians have been displaced by the conflict since March 2011. The clerics also reported damage to at least 57 Christian sites since the beginning of the civil war.
The reason for this is not just intolerance of the radical
Islamists but the fact that many Christians have rallied
to President Bashar al-Assad's side, fearing the harsh
Islamist ideology of the opposition fighters. By
destroying Christian churches, stealing ancient and
revered icons rebels try to take revenge. Unfortunately,
it goes far beyond vandalism. Just recently the rebels
abducted 12 Syrian and Lebanese Orthodox
nuns from a Christian village of Maaloula near
Damascus. The nuns were kidnapped during the night from
the Orthodox Monastery of Santa Tecla and taken to
Yabrud.
An assistant of the Patriarch of Antiochia
Metropolitan Luka al-Huri says it’s just one of
daily acts of violence against the Syrian Christians:
"Christian communities are constantly being attacked
by different Jihadist groups. They loot the churches, burn
down the houses, ruin the sites and profane our relics.
Their aim is to destroy the Christian civilization in
Syria. Islamic militants destroy the cultural and
religious heritage of our country. Peace and brotherly
unity in which our nation used to live despite the
confessional and ethnic differences, is now under
threat," Metropolitan Luka al-Hur said.
While Syrian Christians are struggling to protect their
relics and simply survive, Russian churchgoers lend a
helping hand. In the past few months they have sent $1.3
million to Syria dispatching the money to a Greek Orthodox
Church in Damascus to buy basic goods like food, clothes,
and mattresses. One of the priests collecting donations is
Father Alexander Diaghilev, whose church is just outside
St Petersburg, turned to the Bible to explain to his
parishioners why they should help the Syrians.
"I told them St Paul collected money for Christians
in Jerusalem. He collected it in Corinth, although Corinth
was in the far-off territory of Greece, quite far from
Palestine. I gave people the same reason now: probably you
don’t know these people in Syria, but these are our
brothers and sisters who are suffering. We have passed
through great persecutions and World War II not so many
years ago, so many of us remember what that is, or our
parents remember how it was. And so we have to help those
people who are suffering nowadays,"Father Alexander
said.
The Kremlin also expressed its support by saying
it’s ready to consider a Russian citizenship request
from about 50,000 Syrian Christians following the Russian
Foreign Ministry publishing a collective request for a
double Russian-Syrian citizenship from a group of
Christians living in the Kalamoon district. However, the
majority of Syrian Christians are determined to stay in
the country protecting their heritage even under threat of
being physically eliminated by terrorists. Sadly, it means
the number of the victims of the carnage is to go up.
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