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Syria:
Charity Gives Urgent Help after Exodus of Christians from Homs, Escaping the horrors of persecution
Charity gives urgent help after exodus of Christians from Homs - By John Pontifex
ACN NewsSYRIA: ALMOST the entire Christian population of the Syrian city of Homs has fled violence and persecution – and a leading Catholic charity is providing emergency aid to help them.
The mass exodus of 50,000 or more people to villages and towns around the city comes amid reports that the homes of Christians in Homs have been attacked and seized by ‘fanatics’.
Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, which announced on Monday 26th of March an urgent $100,000 aid package providing food and shelter, has been told that 90 percent of Christians have left Homs.
The exodus, mostly taking place within the past six weeks, is part of what respected news sources describe as an “ongoing ethnic cleansing of Christians” by militant Islamic groups with links to Al Qaeda.
Until now, Homs has been home to one of Syria’s largest Christian populations, and Church sources have said the faithful have borne the brunt of the violence, escaping to villages many of them in mountains 48 Kms outside the city.
Islamists have reportedly gone from house to house in the Homs’ neighbourhoods of Hamidiya and Bustan al-Diwan, forcing Christians to leave without giving them a chance to take their belongings.
According to other reports, Christians have left their homes voluntarily, in effect making way for others to occupy them to shelter from the violence.
Desperate for food and shelter, the displaced people taking sanctuary in the Wadi Alnasara region and Marmarita and other villages, are to receive aid as part of the $100,000 ACN aid programme.
The assistance will provide each family with US$60 each month for basic food and lodging, with the hope that by the summer they can return home.
ACN is also helping families caught up in a car bomb explosion last Sunday (18th March) which targeted the Christian quarter of Aleppo, close to the Franciscan-run Church of St Bonaventure.
Overseeing the aid programme, Bishop Antoine Audo SJ of Aleppo told Aid to the Church in Need: “The people we are helping are very afraid.”
Speaking today (Monday, 26th March) from Aleppo, the bishop added: “The Christians don’t know what their future will hold. They are afraid they will not get their homes back.
“It is very important that we do whatever we can to help the people.”
In his application for ACN aid, the bishop stated: “Please speed up the implementation of the project because of the difficult circumstances that Christians face in Syria.”
The bishop, who heads Aleppo’s Chaldean diocese, paid tribute to ACN benefactors, adding: “Thank you for helping us. Pray for us and let us work together to build peace in Syria.”
(Bishop Antoine Audo SJ of Aleppo © ACN)
His comments come as fears grow of Syria becoming a “second Iraq”, following a similar pattern of church attacks and forced expulsion and kidnapping of Christians.
If the attacks continue, Syria could suffer the same fate as Iraq where Christians have plummeted from 1.4 million in the late 1980s to perhaps less than 300,000 today.
In both cases, the Church has been targeted for perceived close links with regimes under fire from opposition parties and rebel groups.
The Homs crisis has prompted increased fears that Islamists are gaining influence in the region, filling the power vacuum left when decades-old regimes across the Middle East were overthrown at the start of the so-called Arab Spring.
Editor’s Notes
Directly under the Holy See, Aid to the Church in Need supports the faithful wherever they are persecuted, oppressed or in pastoral need. ACN is a Catholic charity – helping to bring Christ to the world through prayer, information and action.
The charity undertakes thousands of projects every year including providing transport for clergy and lay Church workers, construction of church buildings, funding for priests and nuns and help to train seminarians. Since the initiative’s launch in 1979, Aid to the Church in Need’s Child’s Bible – God Speaks to his Children has been translated into 162 languages and 48 million copies have been distributed all over the world.
While ACN gives full permission for the media to freely make use of the charity’s press releases, please acknowledge ACN as the source of stories when using the material.
For more information or to make a donation to help the work of Aid to the Church in Need, please contact the Australian office of ACN on (02) 9679-1929. e-mail: info@aidtochurch.org or write to Aid to the Church in Need PO Box 6245 Blacktown DC NSW 2148.
On Line donations can be made at
www.aidtochurch.org
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