‘Since you’re a Christian, if you don’t convert we’ll slit your throat with a knife’

Catholic News Agency chronicles what is being called a miraculous escape from ISIS for a Syrian Catholic priest:

“This is the miracle the Good Lord gave me: while I was a prisoner I was 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, just one of the thousands of the martyrs for Christ,” the Syriac Catholic priest, Father

Father Jacques Mourad, who recently escaped from the Islamic State. Credit: Terre Sainte Mag.

Jacques Mourad, told Italian TV 2000.
“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 the Islamic State. A miracle that the Virgin Mary worked for me.”
Father Mourad was prior of the Monastery of Mar Elian in the Syrian town of Al Qaryatayn, about 60 miles southeast of Homs.
He said he was captured with another young man on May 21 after the militants arrived at the monastery.
“The first four days we were in the mountains, locked up in the monastery’s car we were captured in,” he said. “On Aug. 11 we were taken to near Palmyra, where there are 250 other Christian prisoners from the city of Al Qaryatayn.”
The Islamic State hadcaptured Al Quaryatayn Aug. 6. Only around 30 Christians were able to escape the town for Homs after it was captured.
Father Mourad that his captors regularly asked him to declare his faith.
“Almost every day there was someone who came to my prison and asked me ‘what are you?’
“I would answer: ‘I’m a Nazarene, in other words, a Christian.’
“‘So you’re an infidel,’ they shouted. ‘Since you’re a Christian, if you don’t convert we’ll slit your throat with a knife’.”
Despite the threats, the priest refused to renounce Christ.
Father Mourad said he wore a disguise in order to escape.
“I escaped on a motorbike with the help of a Muslim friend. But now I’m working with an Orthodox priest and other Bedouin friends and a Muslim friend to free the 200 other Christians who are still imprisoned,” he said.
According to the priest, 40 other Christians were able to escape the same day as his interview with Italian television.