By John Evans
DAMASCUS, Syria (BP) — For Hanna, a Syrian Christian mother living in Damascus, the country’s civil war is more than just statistics and news articles.
“Every day when I walk to the school I work at I hold my breath; every minute something can happen,” she wrote in a first-person account to Open Doors USA, an organization supporting persecuted Christians. “Many streets are closed and when you walk the streets you see the traces of the battle: little fires all over the streets. Also in our house you see the traces of the war: we already noticed a bullet hole in our guest room, but recently I also discovered one in the room of my girls.”
As the conflict between President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and rebel fighters rages on, the country’s Christians fear they are becoming easy targets for Islamic extremists.
“In fact attacks on churches happen a lot now. They are also targeting Christians,” Hanna wrote. “Many of them are killed or kidnapped. When they are kidnapped they ask their families for ransom or they force them to convert to Islam. Women are often raped. The people that return from such events are traumatized. One of the men I know that came back from a kidnapping didn’t speak a word since he came back. He is crying a lot. Nobody knows what happened to him.”
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