Forgotten survivors

Each winter those of us who look on from the outside think Syria (and now Iraq) can’t get any worse. And each winter it does.

Antoine Audo and other Syrians are entering their third winter since civil war began. If heating fuel can get any scarcer, it has. If bread can be any more expensive, it is. If bombing can sound any more frighteningly unending, it does.

Last year at this time WORLD chose Audo, the Chaldean bishop of Aleppo, as its Daniel of the Year. Audo is a lifelong resident of Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city. As a bishop of 25 (now 26) years, he is one of the longest-serving leaders in the church in Syria, and in the Arab world. We selected him because he represented the “long-suffering, not-going-anywhere Christians” of the Middle East, ready to stand with their Christian and Muslim neighbors amid the devastation, to extend a hand of charity and a word of truth no matter the cost.

One year later Audo still is standing. His church numbers have dwindled, as more have fled to other places of refuge or been killed. At the same time, the church is feeding more than double the number it was a year ago—3,000 families a month in 2013 and now 7,000 families, he told me by phone.

“It’s not easy,” he said, “but we do our best.”

Poverty is one of the biggest challenges in 2014. “Everybody became poor in Aleppo with war,” Audo said. Once an industrial heartland, the city’s unemployment rate is 80 percent. “We have even doctors and engineers asking for baskets of food,” he told me.

With the June sweep of ISIS into Iraq, more international attention has focused on fighting the terrorist group, but less on ending the civil war in Syria. Headline-grabbing beheadings in Iraq overshadow the daily atrocities of war in Syria, where ISIS has beheaded dozens, along with confiscating church and residential property and imposing draconian Sharia law in villages not far from Aleppo.

‘Everybody became poor in Aleppo with war. ... We have even doctors and engineers asking for baskets of food.’ —Audo

Government forces this year have dropped barrel bombs, indiscriminately destroying apartment buildings and the lives of men, women, and children. “Nearly always we hear bombs,” Audo said. As the fighting drags on, the city cannot be rebuilt, businesses and shops cannot reopen, and hopelessness sets in. Clinical depression and the psychological scars of war have become significant problems, both in and outside the church.

Aleppo long had a hold on the Western imagination. Shakespeare alluded to it twice in Macbeth, and since the Ottoman era it boasted the largest souk in the Middle East, eight miles of narrow lanes winding beneath ancient stone archways. In those dark and sometimes dank alleyways lurked places of intrigue and Byzantine deal making. When the Silk Road trade routes ruled the global economy, it was one of the largest marketplaces on earth. But fighting between rebel forces and government troops in 2012 led to fires that largely destroyed the souk, along with the nearby Citadel, a medieval fortress at the heart of the old city.

More than 100,000 Syrians have been killed in three-plus years of fighting, and as of Nov. 20 the refugee toll, those who have fled Syria altogether, stood at 3.2 million. Most are in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, but many now range as far as North Africa, some boarding boats to get there. Most peculiar of all, perhaps, are the thousands who even this month are pouring into Iraq, some of them Arabs desperate enough to seek refuge with Kurds in areas just a few miles from ISIS-held territory.

What do you need? I asked Bishop Audo. “We need prayer and patience,” he said. And though I knew it was pointless, I asked how long he would stay.

“I will never leave because I am a bishop and it is my country. It is my vocation and part of the teaching of the church to live with those who suffer and to give our testimony as Christians. Here I live, here I die.”

Email mbelz@wng.org