The Islamic State militant group has abducted 230 civilians, including at least 60 Christians, after seizing a strategically located town in the central Syrian province of Homs.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based monitoring group, said the civilians were taken on August 6 in the town of Al-Qaryatain, which IS militants captured late August 5.
Many of the Christians had fled from Aleppo, in Syria's north, to seek refuge in Al-Qaryatain.
Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said those abducted were wanted by IS for "collaborating with the regime."
Al-Qaryatain had a pre-war population of 18,000, including Sunni Muslims and around 2,000 Syriac Catholics and Orthodox Christians.
But the town's Christian population has dropped to only several hundred.