Priest gives thanks for escape from IS

Fr Jacques Mourad, who was kidnapped by Islamic State (IS) terrorists on 21 May, and escaped earlier this month, has talked for the first time about his experience. Fr Mourad was prior of Mar Elian Monastery in the Syrian town of Qaryatayn, 60 miles south-east of Homs. “I was a prisoner waiting for the day I would die, but with a great inner peace. I had no problem dying for the name of Our Lord; I wouldn’t be the first or the last,” the Syriac Catholic priest told Italian TV 2000.

His captors regularly asked him to declare his faith. “I’m a Nazarene, a Christian,” he had said. “So you’re an infidel,” they shouted. “If you don’t convert we’ll slit your throat with a knife.” The priest refused. “I want to thank all those who prayed for my liberation. It’s truly a miracle that a priest has been freed from the hands of IS. A miracle that the Virgin Mary worked for me,” Fr Mourad said.

Speaking in Westminster Cathedral last Saturday, John Pontifex, head of press and ­information for Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), told an audience of 200 that he had spoken with Fr Mourad by telephone from Syria. Fr Mourad said ACN was helping to protect the Christians in the hands of IS, and had in­directly contributed to his gaining his freedom. He told Pontifex how pressure from Qaryatayn Muslims had prompted his being returned to the city, still a captive, following 84 days in a prison at the terror group’s headquarters in Raqqa, northern Syria.

Prior to his capture, when Qaryatayn’s water supplies had been cut off, Fr Mourad said he had helped build a reservoir there with the help of ACN. Apparently IS had responded to demands from the population for his return.

“One day, one of the IS leaders came to me and said: ‘Everybody in Qaryatayn has been asking for you.’ I was led away, still blindfolded with hands bound, and I was taken into what seemed like a huge tunnel,” Fr Mourad told Pontifex. “Some time later, they removed my blindfold and I could see all my parish in front of me in the shelter that ACN had built.” Fr Mourad told Italian TV he “escaped on a motorbike with the help of a Muslim friend”.