We held an event called "Voices from Syria - a talk by Reverend Andrew Ashdown" on 22nd October 2016 at our mosque.
Reverand Andrew Ashdown is an Anglican priest in the Winchester Diocese who has been visiting and leading groups to the Middle East for over 20 years.
He visited Syria several times prior to the conflict and is one of the few non-journalists to have travelled extensively in the country four times in the last 2 years, both as a member of international faith delegations and independently. He has spent time with ordinary Sunni, Shia, Alawite, Christian, Druze and Kurds; met with faith and community leaders in Damascus, Homs, Tartous, Lattakia and met with reconciliation committees in Homs and elsewhere.
He has also met with government and internal opposition figures; and visited refugee camps at Yarmouk, and in Lebanon and Iraq.
In November, he spent a few days at a monastery just a few kilometres from ‘ISIS’ lines, and he was most recently in Syria last month.
It was very disheartening to hear the Reverand share the damage and displacement of the people of Shaam. The town that would be flooded during these months of Muharram and Safar by millions of us.
