The international community was shocked Thursday when bombs planted by rebel jihadists in tunnels beneath the city of Aleppo destroyed a large hotel and inflicted further damage to the war-torn ancient city's historic core.
But what has largely escaped international attention this week is the extent of damage wrought by the same kind of jihadists to age-old Christian sites in the mountain village of Maalula, home to one of the few communities in the world that still speaks Aramaic, the Hebrew language of Jesus.
It was in September that elements of the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front overwhelmed the handful of Syrian soldiers guarding the entrance to the community and occupied the village an hour's drive northeast of Damascus. The hope then was that the rebels would not harm the vestiges of the Christian community that inhabited this place since the earliest days of the Common Era, following in the 1st-century footsteps of Saint Paul.
Syrian government forces, aided by fighters from Hezbollah whose headquarters is just over the other side of the mountain, drove the rebels out of Maalula in mid-April.
A handful of journalists were taken to the village about three weeks ago and reported on some of the damage. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad even made a brief appearance at the site. But only this week was a report released by the government's antiquities department that detailed the extent of the destruction.
The picture it paints is not a pretty one.
In the Greek Orthodox Monastery of Saints Serge and Bachus, built in the early 4th century, the large dome over the building has been destroyed and two of the sides of the monastery severely damaged. The crosses have been removed from the big dome and from a dome over the bell.
Inside, in the Chapel of Saint Serge, perhaps the oldest Christian chapel in the world, the large marble altar has been destroyed and its wooden cross smashed. Beneath the altar, the floor has been drilled in an apparent attempt to find treasure. All the moveable antiquities and holy items are gone including the most important Maalula icons.
It was news of the altar that grabbed my attention. It was the kind used by Romans in their pagan temples. Semi-circular, it was sculpted to form a seven-cm lip designed to keep the blood of sacrifices from spilling over.
The monastery honours the martyrdom of two Roman officers who refused to renounce the Christianity they had adopted in defiance of Roman law.
Serge and Bachus were said to have been particularly close friends, so close that the pair has been adopted as kind of patron saints of some in the gay community in the West.
The damage also was extensive in the convent of Saint Takla at the other end of Maalula. According to the report by the antiquities department, the primary shrine that contains the tomb of the saint has been completely burned and the most important icons and other significant religious items are missing. A fire also was set in the chapel of Saint John the Baptist inside the convent and extremist phrases painted over its frescoes.
Takla is revered as a beautiful young woman of the 1st century who became an admirer of Saint Paul and followed his teachings on the importance of chastity. On numerous occasions she spurned those who would bed her, even at the price of being sentenced to execution, only to be spared death by some heavenly intervention.
Apocryphal tales such as these have helped keep alive the early beliefs upon which Christianity was built.
The speed with which the antiquities report was made, like the speedy visit of Mr. Assad, indicates that the Syrian regime knows the sensitivity of this issue and wants to make sure the rebels are blamed for the sacrilegious damage. The few reports from Maalula indicate that shelling by government forces was likely responsible for a good part of the destruction, including some of the damage done to the Monastery of Saints Serge and Bachus.
However, more selective damage cited by journalists and by the antiquities people suggests that churches and other Christian sites were singled out by the jihadists.
Indeed, throughout Syria, extreme fundamentalists among the rebel fighters seem to have gone out of their way to frighten the country's Christian community that numbered some 1.8 million – about 10 per cent of the population – before the civil war.
In the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, headquarters of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS), for example, convicted collaborators have been crucified.
As some of Maalula's determined citizens begin to trickle back into their village they must be wondering: After almost two millennia of preserving the language and teachings of Jesus and his disciples, will their tiny community ever be the same again?