Abp. Cordileone said on X that a report from a trusted source detailed escalating Islamist violence under the new Syrian regime.
UPDATE: Archbishop Cordileone said that he was unable to confirm the news about the executions of 48 Christian women in a post on X: "I have not been able to confirm the executions on Pentecost Sunday. It may not be true, but the Christians in Syria really are in a dire situation."
(LifeSiteNews) — Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone has said that 48 Christian women were executed in Syria on Pentecost, according to a source he cites.
On June 10, the Archbishop of San Francisco wrote on X: “News has reached me that I can't personally confirm but from a source I trust, that at 4 a.m. on Pentecost Sunday, 48 Christian women were executed in a Damascus suburb. May the Lord take them home. May their blood be the seed of the Church. May the international human rights community rise up to protest these killings.”
Since the fall of the Assad regime and the takeover of the country by former Islamist militia leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria has been transformed from a dictatorship that generally provided for religious freedom to an Islamic state that persecutes Alawites and Christians.
In an exclusive interview with LifeSiteNews published in April, the head of Christian Solidarity International (CSI) Germany, Father Peter Fuchs, described how the Alawites are being slaughtered by Islamist forces supported by the government and how Christians are pressured to accept Islam, living in fear they may be next in line to be killed.
According to Fuchs, who has visited Syria many times and is well connected within the country, Christians are “terrified because of … the genocidal attacks against the Alawites.”
READ: Patriarchs in the Holy Land condemn attacks on Christians, civilians in Syria
“This also affects Christians to the core, and many Christians naturally say that what we are seeing now with the Alawites could happen to us; we just don’t know when,” he said, adding that “Christians in Syria all remember the battle cry of the Al-Nusra Front, which was founded by Al-Sharaa in 2012: ‘Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave.’”
“There are checkpoints all over the country, and we have heard that when Christians are in cars and come to these checkpoints, they are told that the jihadist fighters at the checkpoints will tell them that they are not allowed to pass until they recite the Islamic creed,” Fuchs told LifeSiteNews.
Similarly, “young [Christian] men in Homs are threatened with being beaten up if they don’t recite the Islamic creed.”
Fuchs also said that Christian children are forced to recite Koran verses in school, and girls are mandated to wear the Islamic hijab.
