“Before the war there was no separation between Christian and Muslim,” I was told on a recent visit by Shamun Daawd, a liquor-store owner who fled Baghdad after he received Islamist death threats. I met him at the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate in Damascus, where he had come to collect the rent money the Patriarchate provided for the refugees. “Under Saddam no one asked you your religion and we used to attend each other’s religious services,” he said. “Now at least 75 per cent of my Christian friends have fled.”
Those Iraqi refugees now face a second displacement while their Syrian hosts are themselves living in daily fear of having to flee for their lives. The first Syrian refugee camps are being erected in the Bekaa valley of Lebanon; others are queuing to find shelter in camps in Jordan, north of Amman. Most of the bloodiest killings and counter-killings that have been reported in Syria have so far been along Sunni-Alawite faultlines, but there have been some reports of thefts, rape and murder directed at the Christian minority, and in one place — Qusayr — wholesale ethnic cleansing of the Christians accused by local jihadis of acting as pro-regime spies. The community, which makes up around 10 per cent of the total population, is now frankly terrified.
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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • Religion & Culture • Violence • * Economics, Politics • Foreign Relations • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • Middle East • Iraq • Syria • * Religion News & Commentary • Inter-Faith Relations • Other Churches • Other Faiths • Islam • Muslim-Christian relations
Posted August 7, 2012 at 3:00 pm
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