As the war in Syria enters its eighth year, clergy who have watched their congregations dwindle fear that those who have left the country may not return. One priest expressed his fear that “Christianity will be erased” from certain areas of the country “because the Christians who left these places won’t come back, even if the army liberates those areas”.
The priest, who did not wish to be named, said every war in the region leads to a decrease in the number of Christians. “The emigration of Christians makes the Church weaker and weaker,” he told the Christian charity Open Doors International.
Syria had a pre-war population of 22 million, but over 400,000 have been killed (that is the latest figure to have been published by the UN in 2016, after which it stopped counting because numbers could not be verified). In addition, 5.6 million have left as refugees and more than 6 million are internally displaced. There are no reliable figures available for how many Christians have left the country.
Many of the young Christian men who used to volunteer at churches in various roles have emigrated, creating a gap that is hard to fill, Fr. Yuhanna Alzakimi, a Syriac Orthodox priest from Homs, told Open Doors: “Among those who left were several servants of the Church; some of them left in a short period of time. For the Church, it wasn’t easy to train their…
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