Two Swedish parliamentarians of Syriac Christian heritage, Yusuf Aydin and Paul Sabo, from Sweden’s center-right Christian Democratic Party, have issued a joint statement condemning repeated attacks against Christians in Syria, warning that the violence is not an isolated incident.
The lawmakers belong to the Syriac community, an ancient Middle Eastern Christian ethnoreligious community with roots in Mesopotamia and the Levant, traditionally associated with the Syriac language, a form of Aramaic, the language family spoken in the time of Jesus Christ.
Their statement follows violence in the predominantly Greek Orthodox Christian town of Al-Suqaylabiyah, in Syria’s Hama province, where a confrontation involving residents of the neighboring Sunni-majority town of Qalaat al-Madiq escalated into reported attacks on homes, businesses, and civilians, with armed men firing at residential buildings and an Orthodox priest narrowly escaping gunfire directed at him and his vehicle.
They emphasized that Christians are among Syria’s indigenous peoples, whose presence in the region dates back to the earliest centuries of Christianity.