The leader of the Greek Catholic Church in Syria said that if the U.S. were to launch an attack on the country, it would be “a criminal act” and would “reap more victims as Islamic Extremists continue to flow into Syria.

As reported by cnsnews.com, Gregory III, the Patriarch of Antioch, who oversees the Melkite Greek Catholic Church in Syria and Lebanon, said:

“We must listen to the Pope’s appeal for peace in Syria. If Western countries want to create true democracy then they must build it on reconciliation, through dialogue between Christians and Muslims, not with weapons. This attack being planned by the United States is a criminal act, which will only reap more victims, in addition to the tens of thousands of these two years of war. This will destroy the Arab world’s trust in the West. What or who have led Syria to this thin red line, this point of no return? Who created this hell in which our people have been living for months? Every day, Islamic extremists from all over the world are pouring into Syria with the sole intent to kill and not one country has done anything to stop them; even the U.S. has decided to send in more weapons. We renew our rejection of any foreign military intervention in the Syrian crisis.

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Gregory also condemned the influx of weapons and money into Syria:

“For the last two and a half years, Eastern and Western countries have not stopped sending weapons, money, military experts, secret service agents and Salafist fundamentalist armed gangs of thugs and criminals, who have fallen on Syria like a destructive new flood, far more dangerous even than destructive chemical weapons, whose use on our Syrian soil we reject on any pretext whatever.”

The Greek Catholic Church has approximately 1.6 million members in Syria and Lebanon, and in Egypt, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories and Sudan.

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