Activist priest feared dead

BEIRUT - An Italian Jesuit priest who spent decades promoting religious dialogue in Syria and championed the uprising against President Bashar Assad embarked recently on a new mission: convincing an extremist Islamic group to release its prisoners and halt the battles that had spread violence across the country’s northeast.

That was a few weeks ago. He has not been heard from since, and unconfirmed reports that he has been killed have become increasingly common.

The disappearance of the priest, the Rev. Paolo Dall’Oglio, has worried Catholic leaders all the way up to Pope Francis, who has called for his release and offered prayers for his well-being. It has also struck many in the Syrian opposition as a dark symbol of where the uprising against Assad stands and how far some of its principal actors have deviated from the movement’s original aims.

“He kept saying to the people in the revolution that we can’t lose our goal of building a free, democratic Syria,” said Fawaz Tello, an opposition activist based in Germany who knows Dall’Oglio. But Tello said the priest had gone too far by seeking a ceasefire between Kurdish militias and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which is linked to al-Qaida.

“They are not with the revolution,” Tello said. “He was trying to play a role between these two sides, and it was very dangerous.”

Dall’Oglio is the most recent Christian clergyman to disappear in Syria’s civil war between largely Sunni Muslim rebels and government forces that rely heavily on Assad’s Alawite sect, which is an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

The war has left Syria’s Christian minority - about 8 percent of its 23 million people - in a difficult spot. While many oppose Assad’s efforts to crush the opposition, Christians have found little comfort in the largely Islamist opposition, not to mention the militant groups linked to al-Qaida that have emerged as the most formidable fighters on many battlefields.

While most Christian leaders have tried to remain neutral, many have been targeted. Nothing has been heard from a Syriac archbishop, Yohanna Ibrahim, and a Greek Orthodox archbishop, Paul Yazigi, since their kidnapping in April in the northern province of Aleppo by gunmen who killed their driver. Other priests, too, have been kidnapped, with no information given about their fates.

Dall’Oglio, a bearded, gregarious priest in his late 50s, stood out among his peers for supporting the uprising against Assad after it began in March 2011.

He was already wellknown in Syria. He had lived in the country for three decades, spoke fluent Arabic with a Syrian accent and ran the ancient desert monastery of Mar Musa, where he organized programs to promote interreligious understanding.

“He built very good relationships with all of the sects, not just the Christians,” Tello said. “Many of the Muslim sheiks used to know and like him.”

Assad’s government, however, lost patience with Dall’Oglio over his sympathy for the uprising and expelled him from the country in June 2012.

Last month, he traveled to Raqqa in northeastern Syria, the only provincial capital that is completely under rebel control, where activists cheered his arrival at a large nighttime protest.

At the time, Syria’s most radical militant group, the al-Qaida-linked Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, was battling Kurdish militias across a wide area of northern Syria and had detained activists who opposed its agenda.

Dall’Oglio decided to try to engage the group to ask it to release the detainees and negotiate a cease-fire with the Kurds, said Friedrich Bokern, chairman of Relief and Reconciliation for Syria, based in Brussels, who had spoken with the priest shortly before his disappearance.

On July 29, Dall’Oglio entered the group’s headquarters in Raqqa and has not been heard from since.

On Wednesday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the conflict from Britain through contacts in Syria, passed along activist reports that Dall’Oglio had been killed.

The group’s head, Rami Abdul-Rahman, said activists in Raqqa had “received information” about the killing from the extremist group but did not know when or how he had been killed.

Religion, Pages 15 on 08/17/2013

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