Bishops of Aleppo abducted five years ago

Five years after radical Islamists abducted two bishops from Aleppo, the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) would like to draw attention to the situation of the approximately 1,000 Christians still living in the region of Afrin in northern Syria. Due to the invasion of the Turkish army and the allied Islamist militias, their fate is uncertain. “We have to fear that the Christians will suffer the worst if the radical Islamists recognize them as such,” warned Kamal Sido, the STP’s Middle East correspondent, in Göttingen on Thursday. There are many converted Muslims among the small group of Christians in Afrin. They converted to Christianity because they were appalled by the atrocities of Islamist terrorist militias. From the viewpoint of the Islamists, they are “apostates” who have fallen away from Islam and therefore have to be eliminated.

“The Turkish soldiers did not and will not protect the civilian population from the Islamists. Eyewitnesses told us that the Islamist militias are able to patrol the streets, to raid homes, to harass and terrorize the civilian population,” Sido reported. “In Afrin, the Shariah laws have become the norm again – which is why it is even considered indecent for a 13-year-old Muslim girl not to wear a long robe, even if she wears a headscarf. For Christians, the only possibility not to deny their faith is to try and flee.”

The human rights activist emphasized that the overall situation of the Christians in Syria – but also in neighboring Turkey – is extremely worrying. 103 years after the beginning of the genocide against the Armenians and the Assyrian-Aramaic Christians in the Ottoman Empire (April 24, 1915), they now have to fear for their lives again. In 2015, Sido had been in contact with the only Armenian still living Afrin in northern Syrian, but has heard nothing from him since the fall of the city. 

To this day, there has been no sign of life from the two religious leaders who were abducted in northern Syria on April 23, 2013 – the Archbishop of the Syrian Orthodox Church, Mor Gregorius Yohanna Ibrahim, and the Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church, Boulos Yazigi – and nobody has claimed responsibility for the abduction. However – since Islamist militias were already spreading fear in the northwest of Syria near the Turkish border back then, taking Christians as hostages and extorting ransom money – it is suspected that the two bishops became victims of these terrorist militias as well. The unscrupulousness is another indicator. The driver of the two abducted dignitaries, a deacon, was shot in cold blood. Following a proposal by the STP, the two bishops had been awarded the Weimar Human Rights Award in 2014 – in their absence – for their work as mediators, ambassadors, and human rights advocates in the ongoing civil war in Syria.