DAMASCUS, Syria - A beloved, elderly Dutch priest who made headlines this year with a desperate plea for aid for civilians trapped in the blockaded Syrian city of Homs was assassinated Monday by a masked gunman who shot him at his monastery, the latest attack targeting Christian clergymen in the country’s civil war.
The killing of the Rev. Francis Van Der Lugt - a Jesuit, the same order as Pope Francis - underscored fears among many of Syria’s Christian and Muslim minority groups for the fate of their communities as Islamic extremists gain influence among rebels seeking to topple President Bashar Assad.
The 75-year-old Van Der Lugt, an Arabic speaker, had lived in Syria for 50 years and refused to leave Homs even as hundreds of civilians were evacuated from rebel-held districts that have been surrounded for more than a year by Assad’s forces. Van Der Lugt lived in a monastery in one of those neighborhoods, Bustan al-Diwan.
He appeared to have been directly targeted in the early-morning attack, according to several people who were in the monastery when the attack occurred. A single gunman walked into the monastery, entered the garden and shot himin the head, said the Rev. Ziad Hillal.
“I am truly shocked. A man of peace has been murdered,” Hillal said in a phone interview from Homs with the Vatican Radio.
The motives for the attack were not known, and no one immediately claimed responsibility for the killing.
Over the past year, hard-line rebel groups, including the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front, have become more influential and dominant among the opposition fighters in the central city, as in many other areas of Syria.
An activist based in the blockaded, rebel-held area of Homs said rebel fighters were shocked by the priest’s death.
“The man was living with us, eating with us, sleeping with us. He didn’t leave, even when the blockade was eased,” Beibars Tilawi said. Regardless of the rebels’ views toward Christians, the priest was well-liked for his efforts to get the blockade lifted, Tilawi said.
The state news agency, SANA, blamed “terrorists” for the priest’s death but offered no details. The government uses the term for rebels.
Syrian’s main opposition bloc called the killing a “criminal act” and blamed Assad’s forces.
“We hold the regime ultimately responsible for this crime, as the only beneficiary of Father Francis’ death,” the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition said in a statement.
The government has launched a punishing crackdown on Homs, pounding the gunmen holed up in the city’s central districts and encircling them with checkpoints, preventing food and medicine from entering. Hundreds have left the blockaded areas during a series of United Nations evacuations, but Van Der Lugt repeatedly refused to leave until all Christians were evacuated, his friends said.
It’s not immediately clear how many Christians remain trapped in rebel-held parts of Homs. In February, there were about 200 Christian families, according to Syrian Red Crescent figures at the time.
Van Der Lugt lived with 24 other Christians in the monastery. He sought to raise widespread attention to the suffering of civilians in blockaded Homs.
“Hunger defeated us! We can see its signs drawn over the faces,” Van Der Lugt wrote Jan. 25 on a Syrian Christian Facebook group page.
“People are wandering the streets screaming; We are starving, we need food!,” the priest wrote in a statement published in English and French. “We are living a scary reality. Human beings turn into wild animals living in the wild.”
In other news, Syria’s polio outbreak has officially spread to Iraq, the first neighbor of the war-ravaged country to be hit by the crippling virus despite a Middle East inoculation effort.
World Health Organization officials said the first Iraqi polio case in 14 years, that of a 6-month-old boy in Baghdad, was confirmed March 30 by Iraq’s Health Ministry and had the same genetic fingerprint as the virus that paralyzed 27 children in eastern Syria in October. The Polio Global Eradication Initiative reported two new Syria cases last week - in Aleppo and Hama, far from the original outbreak area.
Christopher Maher, the eastern Mediterranean manager of the World Health Organization’s Polio Eradication and Emergency Support unit, said Iraqi officials have been vaccinating children and are expediting another scheduled round of vaccinations.
Information for this article was contributed by Albert Aji, Diaa Hadid, Barbara Surk, Frances D’Emilio, Mike Corder and Sandra Hodzic of The Associated Press; and by Rick Gladstone of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 6 on 04/08/2014