ICC Note: After more than four years of war and nearly 12 million people driven out of their homes, only 53 Syrian Christians have been resettled in the United States. While there are numerous factors, it highlights how little has truly been done to provide a long-term solution for those who are facing persecution and violence.

11/2/2015 Syria (National Review) – Over the past five years of Syria’s civil war, the United States has admitted a grand total of 53 Syrian Christian refugees, a lone Yazidi, and fewer than ten Druze, Bahá’ís, and Zoroastrians combined.

That so few of the Syrian refugees coming here are non-Muslim minorities is due to American reliance on a United Nations refugee-resettlement program that disproportionately excludes them. Past absolute totals of Syrian refugees to the U.S. under this program were small, but as the Obama administration now ramps up refugee quotas by tens of thousands, it would be unconscionable to continue with a process that has consistently forsaken some of the most defenseless and egregiously persecuted of those fleeing Syria.

The gross underrepresentation of the non-Muslim communities in the numbers of Syrian refugees into the U.S. is reflected year after year in the State Department’s public records. They show, for example, that while Syria’s largest non-Muslim group — Christians of the various Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions — constituted 10 percent of Syria’s population before the war, they are only 2.6 percent of the 2,003 Syrian refugees that the United States has accepted since then.

Syria’s Christian population, which before the war numbered 2 million, has since 2011 been decimated in what Pope Francis described as religious “genocide.” Tens of thousands of Aleppo’s 160,000 Christians alone have fled, many to Lebanon, after 1,000 of their community, including two Orthodox bishops, were abducted and murdered, according to Melkite Catholic archbishop Jean-Clement Jeanbart. In Khabour valley, an Assyrian bishop is frantically trying to raise ransom for 200 hostages whom ISIS threatens to kill, while many others of his diocese have fled to Turkey. Thousands of Yazidis, who numbered 80,000, have left after many of their girls and women were enslaved by ISIS in Raqqa. In Homs, Hassake, and elsewhere, the non-Muslim minorities face, in addition to Assad’s barrel bombs and war’s deprivations, targeted execution, rape, kidnapping, and forced conversion to Islam, prompting their exodus.

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