Paul (Yazigi)

Paul (Yazigi) of Aleppo (also known as Boulos Yazigi; born 1959) was the metropolitan of the archdiocese of Aleppo, Syria, of the Church of Antioch.

Life

Born in 1959 in the coastal city of Latakia (Syria) into a very devout Christian family, he was active in the church as a youth. After graduating in 1985 from the Tishreen University with a Civil Engineering degree, he was ordained a deacon and studied theology at the University of Thessaloniki, gaining a Bachelor's degree in 1989, a Master's degree in 1992 and a Doctor of Philosophy. He also studied at Mount Athos.

Paul was ordained to the priesthood in 1992 and was Dean of the Institute of Theology from 1994 to 2000 when he was elected Metropolitan of Aleppo, being enthroned in Aleppo on October 22. He succeeded Youssef (Elias), bishop of Aleppo from 1971 to 2000. His brother is John X, currently the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch.

Kidnapping

In 2013, Paul, along with Syriac Orthodox Archbishop of Aleppo Yohanna Ibrahim, was abducted by militants in the Syrian Civil war; his whereabouts was unknown for several years.[1] The Rewards for Justice Program offers $5 million for information on the ISIS network responsible for kidnapping Christian clerics: Maher Mahfouz, Michael Kayyal, Yohanna Ibrahim and Paolo Dall'Oglio, as well as Boulos Yazigi.[2]

In January 2020, an investigative report published by Mansur Salib, a self-described "Syrian citizen in the United States", alleged that both bishops were killed in 2016.[3]

References
  1. News Regarding the April 2013 Abductions of Bishops in Syria.
  2. "ISIS Kidnapping Networks". Rewards for Justice. Retrieved 1 August 2019.
  3. "Abducted Syrian hierarchs killed in 2016, according to new investigative report". OrthoChristian.Com. 2020-01-16. Retrieved 2020-01-17., citing Fides, Agenzia (2020-01-17). "ASIA/SYRIA - Journalistic investigation". Agenzia Fides. Retrieved 2020-01-17. Among other things, the reconstruction claims - by presenting blurred clues or by aggregating information without objective evidence - that the two Archbishops were tortured, and that one of them, in 2015, was in a health facility in Antioch, the Antakya Devlet Hastanesi, in the Turkish province of Hatay. In the final section, the investigation claims that the two bishops were allegedly killed and buried in an unspecified place in December 2016, while areas east of Aleppo were about to be recaptured by the Syrian army. In conclusion, the investigation published on medium.com may be useful to clarify details of the dynamics of the kidnapping and the early stages of the segregation of the two metropolitans, but in many passages it does not seem to provide certain elements useful to definitively clarify what was the fate of Boulos Yazigi and Mar Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim
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