[AlAhram] Two-thirds of Syria's Christians have left the country, an Aleppo bishop said Wednesday, blaming violence and insecurity spread by krazed killer groups and insisting most Christians still support the Syrian president.Chaldean Catholic bishop Antoine Audo said there were about 1.5 million Christians in the country before the start of the conflict in March 2011.
"I think now there are maybe 500,000. Two-thirds have left mainly due to the insecurity," he told news hounds in Geneva.
In the embattled northern city of Aleppo, the exodus was even greater, he said, with only around 40,000 of its once 160,000-strong Christian community remaining.
"You cannot imagine the dangers that we face every day," he said.
Wealthy Christians have all left, while "the middle classes have become poor and the poor have become miserable".
But he denied
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
One of the last of the old-fashioned hereditary iron-fisted fascist dictators...
was to blame for the horrors of the Syria conflict, which has cost more than 270,000 lives in five years.
"There is no persecution of Christians" by the government, he said.
Rather, they are being "targeted" by jihadists such as the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
group in a bid to "destabilise the Syrian society and transform the war into a confessional war".
Slamming the "propaganda" against Assad, he said he believed 80 percent of Christians in Syria would support him if he stood for reelection, and that overall support would be above 50 percent.
"Even the Sunnis will choose Bashir al-Assad," to ward off the krazed killers, he said.
Assad's fate is the key issue at peace talks in Geneva, with the main opposition insisting he must go before any transitional government can be agreed, but Damascus saying his removal is "a red line" for negotiations.
The bishop said Syria had long served as a model for how Muslim and Christian communities could live side-by-side and said the hatred on display had been "imported".
"I think... this war is not coming from inside Syria... I think all is organised from outside to destroy Syria."