Activist Jesuit priest feared dead in Syria
Italian vanished while on mission to persuade extremists to free detainees
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. Another such report was issued Wednesday by an activist group based in Britain. The disappearance of the priest, Rev. Paolo Dall’Oglio, has worried Catholic leaders all the way up to Pope Francis, who has called for his release and has 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 Qaeda. Dall’Oglio, in his late 50s, stood out among his peers for supporting the uprising against Assad. Last month, he travelled to Raqqa in northeastern Syria, the only provincial capital that is completely under rebel control, where activists cheered his arrival at a nighttime protest.
“God willing, Raqqa will be the first capital of free Syria,” he told the crowd.
At the time, Syria’s most radical militant group, the Al Qaeda-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 ceasefire with the Kurds, said Friedrich Bokern, chairman of Relief and Reconciliation for Syria, based in Brussels.
On July 29, Dall’Oglio entered the group’s headquarters in Raqqa and has not been heard from since, Bokern said.
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 AbdulRahman, 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.