Syria’s Christians poised to flee

By DOMINIC EVANS
Published on 13/09/2012 00:00

On the eve of the pope’s visit to Lebanon on Friday, a small group of Syrians this week debated in a Damascus churchyard whether the time has come to flee one of Christianity’s ancient heartlands.

The members of a Christian community which stretches back 2,000 years worry that Syria’s civil war can have no happy outcome and they face an upheaval that fellow believers have already suffered elsewhere in the Middle East.

“The future is full of fear,” said one man who gave only his first name, Rami. “We hope our fate will not be that of the Christians of Iraq, but nothing is guaranteed. Now we meet in church rather than cafes because we’re afraid of being bombed.”

Rami’s friends were gathered at the Evangelical Church in the ancient Bab Touma quarter of Damascus – the city where Saint Paul began his mission to spread Christianity – a few days before Pope Benedict is due to visit neighbouring Lebanon.

Anticipation of the pope’s Middle East trip has done little to lift the despair which grips the estimated two million Christians in Syria, where president Bashar al-Assad is battling a 17-month-old uprising.

Few Christians have supported the revolt, fearful for their future if the country’s majority Sunni Muslims choose an Islamist leadership to replace decades of ruthless but secular Assad family rule.

Neighbouring Iraq, where sectarian violence after the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein forced half the Christians to flee, offers frightening parallels, while the revival of Sunni Islamists in the 2011 Arab uprisings in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt also fills Syria’s Christians with ­foreboding.

“I’m thinking about leaving the country if Islamists rule Syria,” said a Catholic antiques trader in Damascus. “I expect reprisals against Christians.”

Syria’s Christians, who make up less than 10 per cent of the 23 million population, include Greek Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, Maronite and Melkite Greek Catholic faithful.

Already thousands have left, part of a larger tide of displaced Syrians escaping the conflict in which opposition groups say 27,000 people have died.

The Syriac Orthodox Archbishop of Aleppo, Yohana Ibrahim, said hundreds of Christian families had fled in recent weeks as rebels and soldiers battle for control of the country’s biggest city. “In its modern history ­Aleppo has not seen such critical and painful times as the last few weeks. Christians have been attacked and kidnapped in monstrous ways and their relatives have paid big sums for their release,” he said.

Christian reluctance to join the revolt often goes further into outright support for the 47-year-old president, who himself is from a minority faith.

Mr Assad’s Alawite community, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam which has dominated the country’s ruling class for four decades, is about the same size as the Christian population.

Paolo Dall’Oglio, an Italian Jesuit priest who was expelled from Syria in June after three decades in the country, said: “I said to the Vatican one and a half years ago: ‘If we do nothing, we will be kicked out’. And this is what is happening.”