Human rights group blames Syrian government for most church attacks

Syria’s Christians continue to be caught in the middle of the ongoing war between various anti-government factions, Islamic State (ISIS) militants, and the Assad regime.

They have suffered brutality and fear continued persecution from Islamic militants. As recently as last week, ISIS kidnapped Jacques Murad, a Syrian Catholic priest, from his monastery in Homs, according to International Christian Concern.

For that reason many Christians support President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

“It is the only force protecting us from the jihadists and extremists,” Abu Fadi, a Christian in Aleppo, told Al Monitor.

Fadi admitted that initially some Christians supported the anti-government protests “because they felt it might get the government to fix the problems, you know, like the corruption and other important issues and reforms, like an alarm bell to wake them up.”

“But we soon saw this is not what it was about,” he said. “They just wanted to take power at any cost; they will destroy Syria to do that. They soon showed their true faces, the religious extremism they were hiding. Anyone who took up arms against the state is wrong.”

Despite many Christians’ pro-government stance, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) has discovered that government forces have not been very good protectors.

“Assad government has always promoted itself as ‘the protector of minorities,’ especially Christians,” a new report from SNHR noted. But the government is “willing to target anybody who demands democracy and human rights.”

The report documented attacks on Christian places of worship since 2011 and found government forces perpetrated 63 percent of attacks on churches. Assad’s military was responsible for 40 attacks on Christian houses of worship in Syria, including the Mar Elias monastery where Murad was abducted this month. That monastery alone sustained three separate government shelling attacks in 2012.

Assad forces also targeted Homs’ Lady of Peace, a Roman Catholic church, with mortars and missiles six times and may have been responsible for a land mine inside the church that killed one man.

“Christians and their places of worship have suffered as much as the rest of the Syrian people. Scud missiles, chemical weapons, or barrel bombs do not differentiate between Christians and non-Christians,” SNHR spokesperson Wael Aleji said. “And after the rise and expansion of terrorist groups, Christians suffered different types of discrimination and violence, although they have been living in harmony and tolerance with Muslims for hundreds of years. Christians have become trapped and squeezed between the fire of Assad regime and the hell of the extremist groups.”

SNHR’s investigation found that in some instances, the government forces blamed their own destruction of churches on opposing factions.

The human rights group concluded some targeting of churches was the result of government and extremist groups using them as military bases. But it condemned such targeting as a violation of international law and claimed “these violations mount to the level of war crimes.”

The report acknowledged the impossibility of documenting every incident and noted in cases where churches were close to the front lines, it was sometimes difficult to say which side bore responsibility for attacks.