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Syria

I am certain that the Foreign Secretary needs no point of information from me, but may I nevertheless urge him to bear these facts in mind? Inside Syria—which, as he knows very well, contains an immensely complex ethnic and religious group of people—there has lived for many generations a large Christian community, now estimated to number over 350,000. Its archbishop has publicly said that if the present regime is overthrown and replaced —as it almost certainly would be—by a regime of a different denomination, that community might suffer catastrophe, as the Christian community in Iraq did after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.