EVENTS IN SYRIA.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 212, 12 February 1875, Page 3

EVENTS IN SYRIA.

Events of some gravity, says the Pall Mall Gazette, have taken place in Syria, at Kerdaher, a village situated in the district of Kelbie, about twenty miles to the east of Lattakia. It appears that some premises in this place are used as a summer residence and school by the American missionaries belonging to the neighboring mission station of Boumrah, who have converted to Protestanism a considerable number of families among the semi-pagan Anserieh mountaineers of those parts. The premises in question were forcibly entered on the 13th instant by a company of Turkish soldiers from Lattakia with the intention of arresting certain teachers employed by the American missionaries. The soldiers, it is stated, surrounded the houses of native Protestants, and besides maltreating them spoilt their corn and other provisions. On the same night they entered the house belonging to the Americans, and arrested the four schoolmasters, whom they immediately bound and chained. A small boy in the house was also arrested, and having, in answer to an inquiry by the officer in charge of the troops, replied that he wished to remain a Protestant, was in like manner bound with chains. Some days later the five prisoners were taken to Lattakia and confined in the prisons of that town, from whence it was understood they were to be taken away by the French mail steamer. These circumstances have, according to the Levant Herald, caused “ a painful feeling among the members of the diplomatic body in Constantinople, who are, however, sanguine that a prompt and complete disavowal on the part of the Porte will prove that this violation of a foreign domicile at Kerdaher is only to be attributed to a misunderstanding or an excess of real on the part of a subaltern, and not to an intentional determination to infringe the treaties in vigor, as also the provisions of the new law on landed property in Turkey.”