Unidentified gunmen have abducted two prominent Syrian Orthodox bishops while carrying out humanitarian work in the country's northern province of Aleppo, state media reported late on Monday.
A report by the Syrian State TV identified the bishops as Yohanna Ibrahim, head of the Syriac Orthodox Church in Aleppo, and Boulos Yaziji, who leads the Greek Orthodox Church in the city. It added that the prelates were seized by an "armed terrorist group."
Notably, the two bishops are the most senior Christian clerics to be caught up directly in the current civil war in Syria, where Christians constitute nearly ten percent of the population before the conflict erupted two years ago.
Opposition activists have since confirmed that the two clergymen were abducted as they were traveling along a road to Aleppo from the rebel-held Bab al-Hawa crossing, located on the border with Turkey. But they did not seem to know who abducted the two senior clerics.
An estimated 70,000 people have been killed and millions displaced since an armed rebellion against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad began in Syria in March 2011. The civil war has forced about a million Syrians to seek refuge in neighboring countries, with a further two million more displaced internally.
The conflict is now threatening to spill over to neighboring nations and increasingly becoming sectarian in nature. International efforts at finding a solution to the crisis have been hampered by a deep divisions within the United Nations Security Council.
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