230 abducted since last year

BEIRUT: The Islamic State group kidnapped 230 civilians in central Syria and officials said Friday it had executed more than 2,000 people in northern Iraq’s Mosul region alone since last year.

A year after a US-led coalition launched an air campaign to destroy IS and the caliphate it proclaimed straddling the two Arab countries, the jihadist group has kept up its atrocities.

“Daesh kidnapped at least 230 people, including at least 60 Christians, during a sweep through Al-Qaryatain,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

Amnesty International condemned the abductions as highlighting “the dreadful plight of civilians caught up” in the more than four-year-old Syrian conflict that has cost over 240,000 lives.

Al-Qaryatain lies at the crossroads between IS territory in the eastern countryside of Homs and areas further west in the Qalamun area bordering Lebanon.

It had a pre-war population of 18,000, including Sunni Muslims and around 2,000 Syriac Catholics and Orthodox Christians.

Few Christians remained following the IS offensive in the region but the town was always seen as a symbol of harmonious religious coexistence.

During the 7th century Arab invasions, the town’s Christian population decided that half of every family would convert to Islam to protect the other half, a Qaryatain-born woman told AFP.

“This is why residents often have the same name even though they belong to different faiths,” she said.

She recalled an oecumenical mass celebrating the renovation of a 6th century church in 2009 that was attended by the local imam.

Father Jacques Mourad and Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, two champions of Muslim-Christian friendship who have been kidnapped by IS, also took part in that mass, she said. — AFP