Nuns Released by Syrians After Three-Month Ordeal
Thirteen nuns and three attendants kidnapped from their monastery in the Christian town of Maaloula have been released after three months, with the hand-off ending in a “drama in which rebels said they were protecting the women from government shelling and Syrian officials said they were abducted in an act of intimidation against Christians.”
The New York Times reports that “amid reports of last-minute problems, reporters and government supporters waited hours at the border with no sign of the nuns. Finally, early Monday, the Lebanese channel Al Jadeed showed the black-clad nuns at the border, beaming, as one embraced a Lebanese security official and officers carried another.”
The release could work in favor of the Assad government, which portrayed the release as a major victory, “sending senior figures like the Damascus governor Hafez Makhlouf, a relative of President Assad, to greet the nuns. Their ordeal was a major setback for government opponents trying to persuade fence-sitters not to fear jihadists among the insurgents.”
Children’s Healthcare ‘Disaster’ Looms in Syria
Save the Children has issued a new report that describes “newborns freezing to death in hospital incubators, doctors cutting off limbs to stop patients from bleeding to death and surging cases of polio,” Reuters says.
The wire says that the report “said some 60 percent of Syria’s hospitals have been damaged or destroyed since the start of the three-year-old conflict and nearly half of its doctors have fled the country. [It] described the fallout from the collapse of the medical system as ‘horrific,’ as remaining hospitals and medical staff struggle to treat hundreds of thousands of people wounded by the fighting.”
The report also said that “Syria’s health system is now in such disarray that we have heard reports of doctors using old clothes for bandages and patients opting to be knocked unconscious with metal bars, because there are no anesthetics. The lack of clean water means sterilization for bandages is nearly impossible, causing the threat of infection and possible death.”
Christians Live in Fear in Syria
Antoine Audo, the bishop of Aleppo, writes for the Daily Telegraph on Syrian Christians’ renewed fears and describes their current mindset, as many in the community flee for the Turkish border.
“We hear the thunder of bombs and the rattle of gunfire, but we don’t always know what is happening. It’s hard to describe how chaotic, terrifying and psychologically difficult it is when you have no idea what will happen next, or where the next rocket will fall. Many Christians cope with the tension by being fatalistic: that whatever happens is God’s will,” he says.
“Until the war began, Syria was one of the last remaining strongholds for Christianity in the Middle East. We have 45 churches in Aleppo. But now our faith is under mortal threat, in danger of being driven into extinction, the same pattern we have seen in neighboring Iraq.”
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