Seven Christians are currently living in Deir ez-Zor, a town on the edge of Badiya, in the Syrian desert, near the border with Iraq. A brother and a sister in their seventies, and five-year-old siblings who are not very young either. None of the three hundred Christian families who fled the town in 2013, when its eastern neighbourhoods fell into the hands of the jihadists of the Al Nusra Front, then rivals of the Islamic State (IS) organisation, have returned.
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The “Syrian Notebooks” are a series of reports compiled in the summer of 2024. For security reasons, some of the people quoted speak under pseudonyms. For these same reasons, the names of the authors of these reports are not mentioned.
“Even if the churches and houses were rebuilt, the Christians would not return: the older generation has disappeared and the younger ones have started their lives elsewhere. Most sold their houses. Some have kept them. They came to see what condition they were in after the liberation of the city on 15 September 2017. And, since then, they have been thinking.”says Michel (name has been changed), one of the seven Christians from Deir ez-Zor.
Leaders of various Eastern Christian churches travelled back and forth to assess the damage. None returned. Only a Capuchin priest, based in Lebanon, regularly visits the town to follow the progress of a project close to his heart: the reconstruction of a 1930s Art Deco church, classified as a historical monument, and the adjoining monastery, which were destroyed by ISIS jihadists. He also hopes to restore the adjoining school, run by Mother Teresa’s sisters before it was nationalised by the state in the 1980s.
Without a church or a priest, it will be impossible to convince anyone within the Christian community to return to Deir ez-Zor. The jihadists spared no effort to ensure this. All places of worship were looted and destroyed, including the Armenian monument, which housed the remains of the victims of the 1915 genocide perpetrated by the Young Turks. “The Turks asked Nusra to erase all traces of the genocide”Michel believes.
Artillery fire
Those who have reached Europe will probably never return to this city of 330,000 people in the middle of the desert. About 50 Christian families living in Hassaké, in the north-east of the country under Kurdish administration, have not yet made up their minds. “There is still hope. These families have not sold their homes. But why would they return today? They receive help from Christian associations there. In Deir ez-Zor we receive almost nothing.”asks the Christian resident.
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