A Syrian priest held hostage for months by the ISIS terrorist group is certain his life was saved due to his interfaith work, despite being threatened with beheading by jihadists if he did not renounce Christianity.
The Rev. Jacques Mourad, a Syriac Catholic priest, was taken hostage in May from the Mar Moussa monastery, situated between the capital Damascus and the city of Homs.
He and a volunteer from the monastery were forced into a car and driven for four days, during which time Mourad said he thought he would be killed.
“We could only perceive the sense of the desert. In that moment … I thought it was over,” he told members of Rome’s Foreign Press Association on Thursday (Dec. 10), the first time he has spoken in detail about his odyssey since he escaped.
The two were instead taken to Raqqa, the de facto capital of terrorist group ISIS, and held in a bathroom.
“During these 84 days that I was a prisoner in this bathroom in Raqqa, it could be said that it was one of the most difficult experiences that a person can go through; that of losing one’s liberty,” Mourad said, speaking through an interpreter. “For me it was also a very intense experience, from the spiritual point of view.”
While the priest sought to sustain himself through prayer, he acknowledged there were incredibly dark moments: “It was very difficult above all when they said, ‘Become Muslim or we’ll cut your head off’.”
While the various minority Christian communities in Syria have been decimated during the civil war — and Christians have been brutally murdered and persecuted elsewhere by ISIS and other Islamic extremists — clerics have often been singled out as targets.
Two Orthodox bishops in Syria were kidnapped by ISIS in 2013 and have not been heard from since, and an Italian Jesuit priest, the Rev. Paolo Dall’Oglio, has also been in captivity for two years with no word on his fate. A 75-year-old Dutch Jesuit, the Rev. Frans van der Lugt, was killed by a gunman in Homs in 2014. Continue reading
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- An article by Rosie Scammell, in Religion News Service. Rosie Scammell is a British journalist with extensive experience reporting for leading international news organisations.
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