Syria: More persecutions of Christians at the hands of the Islamic State Terrorists

Fighting in Tel Tamar in the northeast of the country.
On February 23, over 40 trucks of jihad militiamen of the so-called Islamic State (IS) attacked 22 Assyrian Christian villages on the east bank of the Khabur River, in the governorship of Hassake, in the northeast of the country. Hundreds of Assyrian Christians were taken hostage by the jihadists and the churches were burned or damaged. Archbishop Jacques Behnan Hindo, Syrian-Catholic archbishop of Hassake-Nisibi, confided to the agency Fides that “the terrorists attacked the villages from Tel Tamar to Tel Hormuz, where they burned everything. (…) They took dozens of hostages, perhaps with the intent of using them to demand ransoms or to exchange prisoners.” He also confirmed that over 1000 Assyrian and Chaldean Christian families were able to flee these villages and, for the most part, take refuge in Hassake. Archimandrite Emanuel Youkhana, of the Assyrian Christians, explained to Aide à l’Eglise en Détresse (AED – Help to the Church in Distress): “The combats began at 4:00 a.m. (Syrian time)… they took advantage of the PYD’s (Democratic Party of the Kurdish Union) military involvement on other fronts to advance. Especially the Iraqi-Syrian border. That is why there was less resistance to the jihadists.”
“I wish to state clearly,” declared Archbishop Hindo on February 24 to Fides, “that we feel as though we have been abandoned to the hands of the members of the so-called Islamic State. Yesterday, American bombers flew over the zone several times, but did not intervene. We have a hundred Assyrian families who have found refuge in Hassake, but they have received no help from the Red Cross and the Syrian government help organizations, perhaps because they are Christians. The UN’s organization in charge of refugees is as absent as the others.”
On February 27, the number of Christians taken hostage and deported by the jihadists to their strongholds was over 300. “While the first information mentioned 90 hostages,” pointed out the Syrian Catholic archbishop, “we can now say that there are about 350 in jihadist hands,” after verifying and gathering information from those exiled. Among the prisoners were 40 Kurdish militiamen and some Assyrian militiamen from the Suturo self-protection brigade.
On Sunday, March 1, 19 Assyrian Christians from the village of Tel Goran were released by the jihadists for a ransom. Among them were two women, one of whom was pregnant, and had to leave her 6-year-old daughter in the hands of the jihadists. “It was a small group compared to the hundreds of Christians still prisoners of the so-called Islamic State, but negotiations are continuing in the hope of freeing the others as well, and we hope that it will be possible,” declared Archbishop Hindo. In the meantime, the Kurdish militia and the Syrian army have regained control of sectors of the zone near Qamishli, but have not yet tried to take back the Assyrian villages of the Khabur river valley. “ Since the beginning of the jihadist offensive against these villages,” the archbishop then added, “the international coalition’s air raids against the Islamic State’s positions have strangely been suspended.”
Along the river Khabur, a tributary of the Euphrates, were more than 30 Christian villages founded in the 1930’s, where Assyrian and Chaldean Christians had found refuge after fleeing the massacres then being perpetrated in Iraq by the local army. They were flourishing villages, each with thousands of inhabitants, churches and very active communities that also ran schools and social initiatives. But since the beginning of the war, almost all of them have been emptied of their inhabitants, and some now look like ghost towns. Hormuz had over 4000 inhabitants before the war, but in the past few months its population has been reduced to less than 300.
Archbishop Hindo denounced the “grave responsibility of the Western world in setting off the conflicts presently shaking the Middle East.” The archbishop explained to the agency Fides that “with their unfortunate policies, the French and the Americans especially, along with British (he added in KTO’s mike), have de facto encouraged the IS’s rise to power. Now, they are persevering in their mistake, committing grotesque strategic errors such as the announcement of a spring campaign to free Mosul. What is more, they continue to conduct unimportant operations, instead of recognizing that the help the jihadist groups have received has led us to this chaos that is destroying Syria, setting us back 200 years in time.”
John Michael, member of the Democratic Assyrian Movement in the United Kingdom, pointed out to the London Catholic magazine Catholic Herald that the Assyrians are receiving no help from the west, unlike the Iraqi government, the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Shiite militias. “A new genocide is unfolding under our eyes and the world remains silent in the face of the tragedy of the innocent Assyrian Christians,” he proclaimed.
(sources: apic/fides/aed/catholicherald – DICI no.312 March 13, 2015)
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