Free Republic

Christians escaping the two-year civil war in Syria will soon have their own humanitarian aid camp, the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency of Turkey has said. AFAD, as the agency is known, oversees the country’s humanitarian relief efforts. It said the separate camp for Christians is being built near Mor Abraham Syriac Monastery near the Turkish town of Midyat, about 30 miles from the Turkish-Syrian border. The US bishops’ Catholic Relief Services reported in March that approximately 200 Syrian Christian refugees in that area were sheltering in local churches and were afraid to go to the other 17 relief camps...

(AINA) -- Syria's Christians fear an Islamist takeover should the current government be overthrown. During the ongoing civil war there has been a well-documented rise in the number of salafi-jihadist groups operating in Syria that pose a direct threat to Syria's Christian community.1 These militant opposition forces espouse an Islamist ideology, which incorporates elements of Wahhabism2 and Salafism3 and whose stated goals and objectives are by definition hostile towards Christians. Firsthand accounts from Syrian Christian refugees in Lebanon reported by award winning investigative journalist Nuri Kino detail the horror in which they described kidnappings, rapes, harassment, theft and other violent...