LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - According to Moussalli, roughly 200,000 Christians still reside in the war-torn streets of Aleppo. He warns that if the Syrian Army retreats due to attacks by Islamist rebels, the Christians "will be massacred." Moussalli is the patriarchal vicar of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Jordan, which borders Syria on the south. He has spent many years attending to the spiritual needs to Christians who have fled from Iraq (along the western border) into Amman, Jordan. Father Moussalli was among more than 50 regional Christian leaders who joined with Muslim scholars, who met at a conference in Amman against Western military intervention into the region. Not surprisingly, very few - if any of the scholars gathered there saw much use in military intervention. Father Moussalli harshly criticized the West for supporting the Islamist rebels in Syria. "If we [the West] are bombing Syria now, where are all the Christians going? There are two million," he told the BBC. Currently, there are about 2.5 million Christians in all of Syria, and an estimated 220,000 in Aleppo, of which about 10 percent have fled because of the rebel attacks, Moussalli says. Ignatius Joseph Younan, patriarch of Antioch for the Syrian Catholic Church, added at the conference that "We stress that we reject foreign interference in Syria.
Posted on: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 06:45:45 +0000
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