Syria's Christians, a disappearing community
Feature'Syrian Diaries' (3/7). The war, the jihadist push and the lack of reconstruction have taken their toll on the country's plural identity, despite its being a cradle of Christianity.
Seven Christians currently live in Deir ez-Zor, a city on the edge of the Badiya, the Syrian desert, near the border with Iraq. There are a brother and sister in their 70s and a group of five siblings who are no longer young either. Of the other 300 Christian families who fled the city in 2013, when its eastern districts fell first to the jihadists from the Al-Nusra Front, and then to their rivals in the Islamic State (IS) organization, none have returned.
The "Syrian Diaries" are a series of reports written in the summer of 2024. For security reasons, some of the people quoted in these articles have been given pseudonyms. For the same reasons, the names of the authors are not mentioned either.
"Even if the churches and houses were rebuilt, Christians won't be coming back: The older generation has died out and the younger ones have rebuilt their lives elsewhere. Most of them have sold their homes. Some have kept them. They came to see what state they were in after the city was liberated on September 15, 2017. And since then, they've been considering," said Michel (first name changed), one of the seven Deir ez-Zor Christians.
Leaders of the various Eastern Christian churches have gone back and forth to see the damage. None have returned. Only one Capuchin priest, based in Lebanon, visits the town regularly, to follow the progress of a project close to his heart: the reconstruction of a 1930s Art Deco church, listed as a historic monument, along with the monastery attached to it. They were destroyed by IS jihadists. He also hopes to recover the adjoining school, which was run by Mother Theresa's Missionaries of Charity before being nationalized by the state in the 1980s.
Without either a church or a priest, it will be impossible to convince anyone in the Christian community to return to Deir ez-Zor. The jihadists have spared no effort to ensure this. All places of worship were looted and destroyed, including the Armenian memorial, which housed the remains of victims of the 1915 genocide perpetrated by the Young Turks. "The Turks asked Al-Nusra to erase all traces of the genocide," Michel said.
Artillery fire
Those who have gone to Europe will certainly never return to this city of 330,000 souls in the middle of the desert. But the 50 Christian families living in Al-Hasakah, in the Kurdish-administered northeast of Syria, have not yet made up their minds. "There's still hope. These families haven't sold their homes. But why would they return today? Over there, they receive help from Christian organizations, whereas in Deir ez-Zor we receive pretty much nothing," the Christian resident said.
"We've already faced this type of challenge in Iraq, in the Nineveh Plains and in cities like Mosul. Initially, the displaced say they don't want to go home, but when they see that reconstruction projects are starting up and that religious officials are ready to return, they sometimes change their minds," said Vincent Gelot, director of the Syria department of L'Œuvre d'Orient, a French organization that finances and accompanies the Capuchins' project in Deir ez-Zor.
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