A multitude of grim indications have surfaced about the tragic kidnapping of two bishops at the hands of armed factions in Syria. This most heinous of kidnappings in the ongoing Syrian conflict began on April 22, when news spread that gunmen near Aleppo had abducted the city’s Syriac Orthodox Bishop Yohanna Ibrahim and Boulos Yazigi, Aleppo’s Greek Orthodox bishop, who happens to be the brother of Greek Orthodox Patriarch Yohanna X Yazigi. Just hours after the incident, reports spread that the kidnappers were a group of armed Chechen jihadists.

Prominent Syrian opposition member Michel Kilo even wrote about the subject in the April 27 issue of the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir, claiming that the bishops were “released a little over a day after their abduction, only to be reapprehended by another faction, a few kilometers from the first faction’s location.” Since then, no traces or news of the bishops have surfaced. A Lebanese security official who visited Damascus a few days ago and is known to have close ties with Syrian authorities conveyed to Al-Monitor the pessimistic atmosphere in the Syrian capital about the fate of the bishops.

The same official explained that armed kidnappings in Syria have developed a well-known modus operandi among the Syrian officials in charge of looking into them. The goal of the first type of kidnapping is financial gain, whereby a rich businessman, or a man thought to be rich by his abductors, is kidnapped and his family is contacted with a ransom demanded for abductee's release. Negotiations start with a high amount that is subsequently reduced to a few thousand dollars following more serious negotiations. The ransom is then paid, the abductee is released, the kidnappers vanish and the case is closed.

Another type of kidnapping is supposedly politically motivated by narrow internal political considerations. An example is the kidnapping of 11 Lebanese men in the Azaz region, close to the Syrian-Turkish border. On May 22, 2012, a bus filled with Lebanese Shiites was making its way home following a pilgrimage to Shiite holy places in Iran, when anti-Syrian regime gunmen intercepted it inside Syria, only a few kilometers from the Turkish border. The gunmen seemed to know everything about the passengers on the bus, its trajectory and schedule. They allowed the women and children to go free and abducted only the men, publicly accusing them of being supporters of the Lebanese Hezbollah, an ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.