Isolated Catholic village on Lebanon/Syria border: ‘We beg you, help us!’

Author: Kresta in the Afternoon Published on: October 10, 2017 Published in: Christian Persecution

Amalia Awad standing next to a shrine her children have built in honor of her late husband, Boulos Ahmar, who was murdered by ISIS terrorists. (Credit: Inés San Martín/ Crux.)

EL-KAA, Lebanon – Although the fate of Christians is precarious to greater and lesser degrees all over the Middle East, few places embody the full range of challenges quite as much as the small village of El-Kaa in northern Lebanon, just across the border from Syria.

It was founded 450 years, created by a Lebanese prince who wanted a trading center along the main road between Beirut and Aleppo in Syria. An enlightened Druze ruler, he entrusted it to Christians, and it’s remained a Christian settlement ever since.

Those halcyon days are in the past however, and today El-Kaa faces a series of existential threats.

For one thing, it’s an entirely Christian village surrounded by Shi’ite towns and settlements dominated politically by Hezbollah. (The Christians here are almost entirely Greek Melkite Catholics, or, as they say in this part of Lebanon where Greek Melkites are the largest denomination, simply “Catholics.”)

While the Christians of El-Kaa say they’ve always gotten along well with their Shi’ite neighbors and they don’t see Hezbollah as a threat, they also know that if an anti-Christian threat were to arise, they’re basically on their own.

Further, given the border location, they’re in the eye of the storm whenever tensions erupt; the bloody Lebanese civil war started in the area, and when Syrian troops poured across the border to occupy a swath of the country, they rolled through El-Kaa.

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