A man stands inside a damaged church in the village of Tel Nasri, Syria.
Credits: RODI SAID/REUTERS Innocent Europeans are paying the price for European actions in the Middle East, a Syrian archbishop has said.
The attacks on Paris last November 13 and Brussels on March 22 “unfortunately” saw “innocent people reap what European powers have sown in Syria and Iraq in the last few years”, according to Archbishop Jacques Behnan Hindo, who heads the Syrian Catholic Archeparchy of Hassaké-Nisibis.
“Although several European leaders until recently had the fall of the government of Assad as the main geopolitical goal, they also aimed at accrediting the jihadist militia of al-Nusra Front as ‘moderate Muslims’ and attacked Russia for hitting strongholds of those militias, claiming that Russian initiatives were limited to only hitting the so-called Islamic State,” he said.
Moreover, he said, “European leaders, and the entire West have maintained for decades the preferential axis with Saudi Arabia and the emirates of the Arabian Peninsula.” By so funding these countries, he said, they have enabled the financing throughout Europe of “a network of mosques where Wahhabism was preached, the ideology that poisons Islam and serves as the ideological basis for all jihadist groups”.
The archbishop also criticised the confusion shown by Europe’s politicians in the face of the refugee crisis, saying that a panicked Europe had chosen to “become hostage to Turkey”.
Photo: RODI SAID/REUTERS