Message of A Pastor in Aleppo, Syria

Saturday, August 04, 2012

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Hope my email finds you well. Your emails and phone calls were real encouraging for both me and the church. I wrote this mail Wednesday night, but since that time till now, Friday noon, we hadn’t any Internet access or cell phone coverage!

This night (Friday night – Saturday morning) was the worse since 10 days! Very heavy explosions and sound of fighting not far from our home, by strong machine guns. The situation is still the same as for the center of fights and also the same in the other safe areas.

What is very new is that one of the main tribes or maybe more than one tribe (Muslim – Arab, and originally from Aleppo) decided to fight with the army of the government against the oppositions who are nearly from the same background.

On Monday and Tuesday I went downtown again and noticed that the people got used to the new situation, and the bakeries are working a little bit more than the past few days. More streets are closed, and in addition to gas for cooking and gasoline for cars, a lack in Oxygen for medical use is starting to be noticed

Let me explain the fear of the Christians here in Aleppo, it’s not only that they are not armed but they are afraid that the scenario in Homs (another city in the middle of Syria) could be repeated here.

Because what happened there was that when the fights nearly came to its end in Bab Omar “an area there” the fundamental armed groups ran away towards the Christian area and forced some families to leave there apartments and the other families ran away from their fear, until now we have hundreds of Christian families out of their houses which is the same as the Iraqi scenario

I hope that such letters will not annoy the winner side of this fight, since we are used about getting afraid from one side “the government” but now we have another party, or maybe parties, we should be very careful of what might make them mad

Please keep us in your prayers

God Bless you

Author: DanutM

Anglican theologian. Former Director for Faith and Development Middle East and Eastern Europe Region of World Vision International

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