A Melkite-Catholic priest in Sweida, Syria, issued a desperate plea for help from the outside world as Syrian Islamists have been murdering Druze and Christians in Syria.
Father Tony Boutros, a representative of the Melkite-Catholic Church, an Eastern Catholic church in full communion with the Holy See in Rome, was kidnapped in 2015 while driving to a church for Mass. He was then serving as the pastor of the Church of St. Philip the Apostle in Shahba.
Speaking from Sweida, where Islamic forces loyal to Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), are attacking and reportedly slaughtering members of that country’s Druze community, Boutros posted an urgent cry for help to prevent Islamists from wiping out the Druze and Christian communities.
“We are not ‘minorities,” he began. “We are components of this Syrian country, and we have been living together for hundreds of years. We are the people of this land. We and our Druze brothers here, and we live with them. We ask the U.S., Europe, the Vatican, and the whole world for international protection for this region of Sweida, all of it, for us and for our Druze brothers, my dear ones, and we condemn every criminal act.”
“We are advocates of peace, my dear ones, we reject excommunication and we reject killing,” he continued. “All of this is condemned for us. And we want international protection from you. We want to stay in our homes. We want to stay with our Druze brothers, with our people, us and them. Not just neighbors; we are brothers and we coexist. Not just coexist; we are one, living together for hundreds of years, and we will not leave our homes and our land. We demand international protection from the whole world. Look at us. Look at Sweida. Look at the massacres that happened to us in Sweida.”
He then tacitly thanked the government of Israel, among others, who have come to the rescue of the Druze and Christians, concluding, “And I thank all the people who want to help us and stand with us.”
Heartbreaking, Father Tony Boutros, representative of the Greek Catholic Church in Sweida, Syria, makes an appeal to the international community to save Christians and Druze from an Islamist genocide.
“We Christians and Druze are one. Look at the massacre they are committing… pic.twitter.com/DiBZLMBuze
— Dr. Maalouf (@realMaalouf) July 18, 2025
