Two Syrian archbishops from Aleppo were abducted yesterday while traveling outside that besieged northern city, the official news media and anti-government activists reported, making them the most senior church clerics to become entangled as victims in the two-year-old civil war.
The government and insurgent groups blamed each other for the abduction of the two clerics, the Syriac Orthodox archbishop, Yohanna Ibrahim, and the Greek Orthodox archbishop, Paul Yazigi. Activists reached by telephone in the Aleppo area said the pair’s vehicle had been waylaid in the countryside by armed men who shot their driver.
Several prominent Muslim religious leaders have been persecuted or killed since the Syria conflict began, including the highest-ranking Sunni imam in the country in a bombing of his Damascus mosque last month. But until now the fighting had largely bypassed the clerical hierarchy of Syria's Christian minority.
Ibrahim had been supportive of president Bashar Assad and had urged his followers not to abandon Syria, but he had recently turned critical of the government. In an interview with the BBC on April 13th, the archbishop said that perhaps a third of Syria’s Christians had left the country and that he could not blame them, considering the “difficult circumstances in terms of security and the threats they face daily.”
In the same interview, the archbishop chided Assad’s government for “not dealing with the crisis in a better way.” Yazigi was not known to be politically outspoken. Syria’s official news agency, SANA, said the pair had been engaged in humanitarian work when they were seized in the village of Kfar Dael by “terrorists,” the government’s catchall term for the armed opposition.
Anti-government activists said the pair had been in southern Turkey earlier yesterday and had crossed back into Syria at the Bab al-Hawa crossing, which is controlled by insurgent forces. Aleppo, which has been a battleground of the insurgency since last summer, is about 40 miles south of the Turkish border.
The abduction of the clerics in northern Syria came as concern intensified about border tensions in western Syria with Lebanon. A Human Rights Watch report released Monday accused both the Syrian government and the insurgency of striking residential areas in Lebanon on several occasions and killing a number of its citizens. The cross-border attacks appeared to be largely indiscriminate, Human Rights Watch said.
While the Syrian government and armed opposition groups have both said that their attacks on Lebanese villages were in retaliation for provocations, Human Rights Watch said it had not found any evidence of military targets when it visited the Lebanese villages that had been attacked. Its report said the evidence “strongly suggests these attacks were indiscriminate and therefore violate the laws of war,” according to a summary on its website.
Lebanon has officially adopted a policy of dissociation from the Syrian conflict, which has pitted Assad’s Alawite minority against a Sunni-dominated rebellion, but violence is beginning to spill over the border, intensifying sectarian tensions in Lebanon.
The New York Times