Christian Refugees from Syria Number Around 30 Thousand. Dimensions of the Maaloula Catastrophe Go Beyond the Displacement of Hundreds of Families
The small number of Syrian Christian refugees cannot be compared to the number of Muslim refugees. Christians make up no more than ten percent of the Syrian population, at the highest estimate, and they have gone from the regions that they left to other regions of Syria. Those who have reached Lebanon are a small group, no more than thirty thousand people. A significant proportion of them have possessed Lebanese passports and Lebanese identity cards for a long time. This is, for example, the situation of a significant number of the inhabitants of the town of Maaloula, the latest of the Christian towns to be emptied, after waves of expulsions that have affected Christians in the Jazira (al-Qamishly and its region), Homs, Aleppo and Raqqa.
The overwhelming majority of Syrian Christians have been displaced within Syria. Those of them who have emigrated have done so on the basis of preparations made before and during the war through contacts with relatives in Europe and North America. Among those reaching Lebanon, there are some who are attempting to join those who went ahead to the Scandinavian countries and Canada, which they see as a paradise for refugees.
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Notes on Arab Orthodoxy: an-Nahar on Syrian Christian Refugees