Qatari Foreign Minister Khalid al-Attiyah is reported to have told attendees at a Sept. 4 closed-door meeting in Doha that the information available to him indicated that two Orthodox bishops abducted in Syria in 2013 were still alive, despite rumors sometimes circulating to the contrary. The statement was told to Al-Monitor by a high-ranking official who attended Attiyah's meeting with a Lebanese delegation visiting Qatar to discuss the issue 500 days after the abduction of Bishop Boulos Yazigi of the Greek Orthodox Church of Aleppo and the Syrian Orthodox archbishop of Aleppo, Yohanna Ibrahim.
The two men were reportedly detained April 22, 2013, in Damascus by gunmen opposed to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Since that time, there have been contradictory reports about the clerics. None of the reporting on their fate or on the identity of their kidnappers has been confirmed.