Syrian Catholics fear Islamic takeover, plead for West to stop arming rebels
October 24, 2016
Several Catholic Church leaders in Syria beg the US and other Western governments to stop supporting rebel groups, in a Catholic World Report article by Alessandra Nucci.
“Please help us to pull our country back from the abyss of the fundamentalist regime in which they are trying to immerse us,” says Archbishop Jean Clement, the Melike Catholic leader in Aleppo. Church leaders contend that support for rebel groups benefits the cause of Islamic jihadists.
“Just stop selling arms to the terrorists,” pleads Father Mtanios Haddad, a Melkite now serving in Rome. He elaborates:
Three things are needful: stopping the trade of arms from America (destined to the terrorists) closing Saudi Arabia’s wallet (which funds the terrorists) and closing the frontier with Turkey (through which come the terrorists).
Eastern Catholics fear that Americans (and others in the Western world) have been given an inaccurate understanding of the fighting in Syria. “I think that those who control the information in the West have a political agenda,” complains Chaldean Catholic Bishop Antoine Audo of Aleppo.
Speaking for his Melkite flock, Archbishop Clement says: “The idea that one day a fundamentalist Muslim state might be imposed on their children is an unbearable nightmare to them.” Speaking then to the West, he continues: “This is why we turn to our brethren in the West and pray that they may help us prevent this from happening.”
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Posted by: Randal Mandock -
Oct. 25, 2016 1:58 PM ET USA
The next U.S. president says that identifying Muslim terrorists as Islamic extremists fortifies ISIS and serves as a recruitment tool for these Saracens. It has been widely reported by the foreign media for years that the U.S. is funding and supplying arms to Al-Qaeda and other enemies of the former U.S. In recent years Catholic clergymen in Syria and surrounding countries have begged the fundamentally-transformed U.S. to stop supporting the terrorists. Do you think a political agenda is at work
