Nun backs case against gas attack

ADONIS, Lebanon - When Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, wanted to bolster his argument that rebels had carried out the poison gas attacks near Damascus, Syria, on Aug. 21, he pointed to the work of a 61-year-old Lebanese-born nun who concluded that the videos showing hundreds of dead and choking victims, including many children, had been fabricated to provide a pretext for foreign intervention.

“Mr. Lavrov is an intelligent person,” said the nun, Mother Agnes Mariam of the Cross. “He will never stick his name to someone who is saying stupidities.”

Mother Agnes, who had lived in Syria for years, has no expertise or training in chemical-weapons forensics or filmmaking, and although she was in Damascus at the time of the attacks, she did not visit the sites nor interview victims.Still, her assertions - she does not say which side made the videos - have significantly raised her once modest profile as the longtime superior of the Monastery of St. James the Mutilated, a Melkite Greek Catholic monastery in central Syria.

Now she is lauded by supporters of Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, for championing narratives that resemble his own, and vilified by opposition activists who suspect that the government supports her work as an unofficial ambassador.

International rights groups see Lavrov’s reference to the work of an untrained nun as asign of desperation.

“The fact that the Russian government is relying on this woman’s assessment of what happened just shows the lack of evidence for their case,” said Lama Fakih, a Syria researcher for Human Rights Watch. “She is not a military expert.”

There are other shadows around Mother Agnes. She has helped foreign journalists obtain visas, suggesting trust by the government. The widow and two colleagues of Gilles Jacquier, a French journalist killed in Homs last year, published a book in which they suggest that she conspired in a lethal trap set by the government.

She has sued them for libel, has denied any link to the government and has not spoken out in support of Assad. Her only interest, she said, was what is best for Syrians - for outside powers not to interfere so Syrians can solve their problems.

She would not say who she thought had made the videos or who she thought had carried out the attacks. But she said she suspects that some of the children in the videos had been abducted by al-Qaida fighters in Alawite villages more than 150 miles away - a view also voiced by Syrian officials.

Born Marie Fadia Laham in Beirut, Mother Agnes was educated by French nuns. The sudden death of her father when she was 15 left her asking “existential questions.”

She fell in with foreigners who came to Lebanon for the drugs - “Lebanese marijuana is the best in the world,” she noted - and traveled to Indiaand Tibet before returning to religion. At 19, she said, she became a nun in the Carmelite order, where she spent the next 22 years. Much of that was consumed by Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, during which she aided displaced families, she said. She eventually moved to Syria, becoming the superior at the St. James monastery and overseeing a community of three monks and 12 nuns in the town of Qara in the Homs diocese.

Mother Agnes said the government’s brutal crackdowns on peaceful protesters in 2011 had been concocted by the news media, and she dismissed the slow transformation of the opposition movement into an armed uprising, saying the rebels had rushed to violence. While allowing that some protesters had good intentions, she said the conflict was driven by foreign powers, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Brotherhoodand al-Qaida. She pointed to Syria’s current situation, with more than 100,000 dead, bitter sectarian tensions and jihadists taking over swaths of territory, as proof that she was right all along.

She has paid a price for speaking out. This year, rebels near the monastery warned her that extremist fighters wanted to abduct her, and the rebels helped her flee, she said. She has not returned. After the chemical attacks last month, she said, she locked herself in a hotel room in Geneva and pored over videos of the dead on her computer, sleeping only in short spurts and subsisting on water.

Front Section, Pages 7 on 09/22/2013

Upcoming Events