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Although I was back there many times since, I first got to the fabled Syrian village of Maaloula on the afternoon of Easter Sunday 20^th April, 2014, only a few short hours after the heroes of the Syrian Arab Army had liberated it from Syria’s new rulers, who had kidnapped Maaloula’s nuns and robbed and otherwise vandalised its priceless relics. I had organised what was, till then, the largest show of solidarity with the Syrian Arab Republic and I had geared it around Easter Sunday because, like this year, both the Roman and Orthodox Easter Sundays fell on the same day, 20^th April in both cases.

Although Jolani’s cut throats had destroyed Maaloula, there was hope in the air that, just as Jesus had risen from the dead on Easter Sunday, so would the multi-confessional Syria also rise, thanks to the sacrifices of the heroic Syrian Arab Army and their South Lebanese irregular allies. The hope would be that Syrians could, in time, put the unspeakable atrocities of Jolani’s “moderate rebels” behind them and get back to the business of living and partly living, as TS Eliot puts it in Murder in the Cathedral.

And so, the patriarchs, bishops, priests and nuns sang their hymns in the churches Jolani’s thugs had systematically desecrated, the churches and the monasteries were reconsecrated and there was great hope for Syria and particularly in sacred Maaloula that particular Easter Sunday.

This Easter Sunday, it is a different story. Chechens, Tajiks and Uyghurs roam Maaloula at will, killing, raping and robbing as the fancy takes them and all of that is part of Jolani’s sponsors’ efforts to denude Syrians of all hope and to strip them of all their earthly possessions, and of their dignity as human beings as well. This process has been ongoing since even before Easter 2014 and NATO’s leaders and their media whores are fully complicit in it; Nazis like Julius Streicher were hanged at Nuremberg for less than what NATO’s most esteemed Lord Haw-Haws are today doing.

The editorially compromised Economist, to take but one stomach churning example, professes to have conducted a survey purporting to show that a majority of respondents it identifies as “Syrians” support Jolani’s head hackers, who have drenched Syria in unconscionable terrorism, blood and ignorant, religious absolutism. And, no matter who has paid off the Economist and every single other NATO outlet their pieces of silver to whitewash this undeniable jihadist savagery, the facts and figures of the Syrian genocide speak for themselves even if, to take another blatant whitewashing example, the totally repulsive Tony Blair was paid $5 million to whitewash Jolani’s foreign minister at the 2025 World Economic Forum.

The truth is that the heroic Syrian Arab Army were not fighting a rebellion but were trying to save their country and their people from imported zealots in a war that claimed, inter alia, on the “moderate Syrian rebels” side, the lives of at least 6,000 Saudis, 5,800 Turks, 5,500 Palestinians, 4,500 Tunisians, 4,000 Libyans, 4,000 Iraqis 3,000 Lebanese, 3,000 Turkomans, 2,000 Egyptians, 2,000 Jordanians, 1,500 Pakistanis, 1,500 Afghans, 1,500 Yemen, 1,200 Kazaks,1,000 Uzbeks, 700 Kuwaitis, 650 Algerians, 650 Moroccans and a further 30,000 rat bags from a rag bag of European nations.

Of course, now that it is Mission Accomplished and Syria is destroyed, NATO is making the appropriate noises and supplications to cover their own culpability in their rosary of war crimes. The UNSC now expects the head hackers to act in a civilised manner, have their own Damascene moment and refrain from looting, robbing, raping and murdering. The United States congratulates the head hackers on a job well done and they expect the Jolani regime to collaborate with Israel in extirpating the last of the native Christians and other beleaguered minorities from their historical homelands.

Isaiah 17:1 tells us that Damascus will fall and that it will be a heap of ruins. Perhaps it will and its cathedrals will lose their majesty as well as those vibrant flocks of true believers that packed its pews in Easter 2014. Perhaps Maaloula will never again resonate with the hymns in the Aramaic language Jesus spoke and perhaps Assyrian children will no longer make their First Communions where their ancestors have made them from time immemorial.

Though any and all of that would be a great shame, it is a much bigger shame if we sit by and let it happen. Although the Catholic Hierarchy will make the appropriate appeals this Easter, something much more fundamental is needed than that. We must, as Pope John Paul said, use both our Roman and Orthodox lungs and those of the Orient Orthodox Churches as well to breathe in and savour everything, like the Christianity of the Levant, that is good in this world and work firstly for its preservation and then for its revival not only in Syria but far beyond it to Russia’s Borderlands as well, where the same unspeakable atrocities are today being committed against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church‘s faithful by the same sort of NATO flotsam that were hired to destroy Syria.