Damascus, November 7, 2013
The burial of a Christian family, murdered by Muslim extremists, took place on November 4 in the Syrian settlement of Sadad, reports Blagovest.info.
Bodies of six people were found inside a well of the settlement which was retaken by the government troops from the islamists of the Al-Nusra front. The mass murder was probably committed on October 26.
Among those killed there were: 85-year-old Matanios Ash-Sheikh, his 75-year-old wife Habsa, their 45-year-old daughter Njala, and two grandsons: a 18-year-old university student Ranim and a 16-year-old school student Fadi. The sixth victim of the militants was 90-year-old Mariam, the teenagers' grandmother from the side of their father.
The total number of victims in Sadad, whose population consists mainly of believers of the Syriac Church, is 45 people. The history of this settlement goes back to 2000 b.C., it is first mentioned in the Old Testament as Cedad. To this day local residents speak Aramaic—the language that Jesus Christ spoke.
During his talk with representatives of the "Aid to Church in need" charity, the Melkite (Greek-Catholic) Patriarch Gregory III Laham of Antioch called the actions of the militants in Sadad "brutality". "I do not understand why the world community is not raising its voice for denouncing such cruelty," said the Hierarch.
On November 7, Patriarch Gregory was to speak at the panel discussion on the situation in Syria, organized by "Aid to Church in need" in Augsburg (Germany). In October the head of Syrian Melkites visited Great Britain on invitation of the same aid organization, where he called upon the politicians, journalists, and Christian congregations to give support to the persecuted followers of Christ in his country.
The manslaughter in Sadad has become the bloodiest act of violence towards Christians for the whole period of the civil war in Syria that began in March 2011. In the eyes of local Christians, those killed in Sadad are genuine martyrs, for they suffered exclusively for their faith.
