The fate of two Syrian bishops kidnapped Monday in the northern part of the country remains unclear. Reports from a church figure claim the pair was released Tuesday night, but a family member of one of the bishops said that as of late Tuesday they were still being held. Government forces and the opposition have each blamed the other for the kidnapping, which reportedly occurred while the bishops were on a humanitarian mission.

Several prominent Muslim clerics have been killed in Syria’s uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, but the two bishops are the most senior church leaders caught up in the conflict which has killed more than 70,000 people across Syria.

Christians make up less than 10 percent of the country’s 23 million people and, like other religious minorities, many have been wary of the mainly Sunni Muslim uprising against Assad, whose Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam.

In an interview with the BBC earlier this month, one of the bishops, John Ibrahim, criticized the Bashar al-Assad regime “for not treating the crisis in a better way.” Figures in Syria’s Christian community have sometimes been supportive of the regime, with some members fearing that Islamist rebel forces would persecute Christians once Assad was removed from power. The kidnapping deepens concerns that the sectarian dimensions of the Syrian conflict will harden and continue to drive violence, irrespective of the status of the regime.

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