Terrorist group ISIS has abducted as many as 285 Christians from Assyrian villages beginning on Monday, 22 February.
Originally estimated to be between 70 and 100, the number of those kidnapped has risen every day since the attack began.
CNN reported Thursday that the number has reached 262 Christians kidnapped, and the BBC offers this newest report of 285 kidnapped.
Men, women, children, and the elderly were captured as the militants burned and looted their homes. Most of the captives are said to have come from the Assyrian villages of Tal Shamiram, located 50 miles southwest of the Hassakeh provincial capital of Qamishli, another city to the northeast.
Hassakeh borders Turkey and Iraq, and while it is mainly Kurdish, many Arab, Assyrian and Armenian Christians live in the province.
Over 3,000 people have been displaced since the early morning raid on Monday forced Syrian villagers out of their homes. ISIS has been targeting Christians for months, trying to force them to convert to Islam, pay a religious tax (called a jizya), or be put to death.
The motive behind these kidnappings is not yet clear, but one correspondent indicated that these captives might be used as part of a prisoner swap with Kurdish forces.
While Isis has not affirmed the kidnappings, photos have circulated online of ISIS’ fighters using machine guns and looking at maps. These pictures were reportedly taken near Tel Tamr, the area in which the abductions happened.
The captured people have been in touch with relatives, and people in Sweden, Germany, Canada, and the United States are worried for the safety of their family members.
Osama Edward of the Sweden-based Assyrian Human Rights Network, who has relatives in the area, told the BBC that his wife’s elderly aunt and her cousin were among the hostages.
“My wife tried to call her cousin’s house and there was somebody who picked up the phone and said: ‘This is not Akram’s house. This is the Islamic State’s house.’”
One Assyrian woman now living in Beirut has been trying to find out what has happened to her parents, brother and his family.
“Land lines have been cut, their mobiles are closed,” she told the Associated Press. “Have they been slaughtered? Are they still alive? We’re searching for any news.”
“I cannot do anything for them but pray,” she said on the telephone. She has not revealed her identity so to protect her relatives’ lives.
Sharlet and Romel David, another couple in Modesto, California, said they have twelve family members in Syria who were among those captured by ISIS.
“We pray, we pray all the time,” said Romel.
“What we’ve heard is it was like a sea of black uniforms marching through all the villages, burning down the churches, desecrating the crosses and wreaking havoc.”
Sharlet’s 59-year-old brother left California two years ago and moved back to Syria in an attempt to bring his family back to the United States. But he was unsuccessful in bringing them back, and now his family is being held captive by ISIS.
In response to this attack, a prominent Christian Syrian leader called for a US-led coalition to aid the Christian and Kurdish fighters to oust ISIS.
In January of this year, the Kurds attacked terrorists with the help of international air strikes. This was a four-month siege that eventually resulted in those terrorists leaving the border of Turkey.
Bassam Ishak, President of the Syriac National Council of Syria, said that foreign aid is needed to decidedly get ISIS out of their country.
Ishak’s appeal to stop the Islamic State advancement has been echoed by Syriac Catholic Archbishop Jacques Hindo of Hassakeh.
“I wish to say quite clearly that we have the feeling of being abandoned into the hands of those Daesh [the Arabic acronym for Islamic State],” Archbishop Hindo told the Vatican’s Fides news service.
“American bombers flew over the area several times, but without taking action,” he said. U.S analysts have confirmed this report. No military airstrikes against IS have been made in the Hassakeh region.
The area is currently being defended by local military units, but they lack sufficient arms to launch an attack. They said they are currently seeking air support to fight the extremists.
This civil war has been going on for years, and many of these Assyrians do not have basic necessities like food, water, and clothing.
“We have 100 Assyrian families who have taken refuge in Hassakeh, but they have received no assistance either from the Red Crescent or from Syrian government aid workers, perhaps because they are Christians. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees is nowhere to be seen,” Archbishop Hindo told Fides.
The cry for help by Archbishop Hindo, Ishak and other Christian leaders follows a church burning and kidnapping spree that began on Monday.
Osama Edward fears that these Christians might face the same fate as the 21 Egyptian Christians who were beheaded earlier this month.
In Libya, ISIS fighters were filmed beheading 21 Egyptian Christians. The militants were dressed in black, the Christians in orange jumpsuits. After taking their captives to a beach, the ISIS militants forced the Christians to kneel before beheading them all.
In addition to the kidnappings, ISIS also engaged with Kurdish and Christian militiamen while it seized several villages in Syria.
ISIS has also released a video showing their destruction of artifacts in the lands under their control. The video showed men smashing ancient Mesopotamian artifacts with sledgehammers in the Iraqi city of Mosul.
This video only adds to the mounting fears surrounding the fate of the abducted Christians and other minorities targeted by ISIS’ cruelty.
Osama Edward said that these terrorists are wiping Assyrian heritage in Mosul, and at the same time wiping them geographically from the face of the Earth,” the director of the Assyrian Network for Human Rights in Syria said.
By systematically destroying Assyrian heritage, ISIS is eliminating what it views as heresy. It is also believed that they are acquiring and selling ancient artifacts to fund their cruel campaign.
The Assyrian Christians are an ancient race, and their presence in the area goes back to the ancient Mesopotamians.
Christians are believed to have constituted about 10% of Syria’s 22 million people before the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began almost four years ago.
Assyrians, of whom there were about 40,000 in Syria, are Nestorian Christians and speak Syriac, a form of Aramaic, the language of Christ.
The largest concentration of Assyrians in Syria is in Hassakeh province, but there are also smaller communities in Aleppo, Homs and Damascus.
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Hopefully this incident will serve as an opportunity for our own government to finally start backing President Assad and reverse yet another foreign policy disaster that involves using British lives, limbs and taxes to advance an agenda that has absolutely nothing to do with British national interests–in this particular case the Yinon plan—an objective which is evil in both design and execution.
Simply put–is it not high time our foreign policy was decided by British interests and not by a combination of the A I.P.A.C. – NEOCON–Israel 1st ethnic matrix that controls the U.S.G and a bunch of (faked/real?) you-tube videos which mysteriously appear on a website known as Site Intelligence run by ex-I.D.F. operative Mrs Katz and are then broadcast around the world (no questions asked!)?
Your readers should have no doubt that this conflict is not a spontaneous uprising (the so called Arab Spring) but rather planned by our own side.
Here is General Wesley Clark telling us that 1 month after 9/11 he was told that 7 Arab regimes including Syria were to be overthrown for no reason remotely related to that crime. (In fact the Syrian government was a secular bulwark against SUNNI Al Qaeda!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RC1Mepk_Sw
Here is Roland Dumas (France F-M) telling us that Britain asked France to join it in a crusade to overthrow President Assad a full 2 years before that “spontaneous uprising” (!) began
http://nsnbc.me/2013/06/16/dumas-top-british-officials-confessed-to-syria-war-plans-two-years-before-arab-spring/
And if you care to research respectable alternative media outlets (i.e. not Sky-CNN-BBC) you will be told that the SUNNI army of ISIS was created as part of a divide and conquer outfit to destroy the Shiite crescent of Hezbollah-Iran-Syria all of which stand in the way of the Yinon plan. It is divide and conquer because Sunnis can be played off against Shiites in the same way as Catholics v Protestants in the 16th Century.
And who exactly created ISIS? Training= UK, USA, Israel—logistics= Jordan and Turkey– finances= Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Victims = the Syrian people (and us indirectly)
An ISIS foothold in Syria would have been INCONCEIVABLE without the central government 1st being weakened and destabilized by the fake uprising we sponsored.
190,000 Syrian deaths later it is perhaps time to recognize that these U.S. NEOCONS (be it in Ukraine, Syria, LIbya or Iraq) are a force for evil from whom we need to urgently un-muzzle our foreign policy!
All very sad.
[…] The number of Christians kidnapped by ISIS has risen every day since their offensive began on Monday. Terrorist group ISIS has abducted as many as 285 Christians from Assyrian villages beginning on Monday, 22 February. Originally estimated to be between 70 and 100, the number of those kidnapped has risen every day since the attack began. CNN reported Thursday that the number has reached 262 Christians kidnapped, and the BBC offers this newest report of 285 kidnapped. Men, women, children, and the elderly were captured as the militants burned and looted their homes. Most of the captives are said to have come from the Assyrian villages of Tal Shamiram, located 50 miles southwest of the Hassakeh provincial capital of Qamishli, another city to the northeast. CONTINUE READING >>> ISIS Abducts 285 Syrian Christians […]
The General Wesley Clark video strangely rings a bell from long ago. In September 1989 I was on holiday in Yugoslavia. In those days very many English people went on reasonably priced “Yugotours” holidays on the Adriatic, or in the mountains of Slovenia. Even if it wasn’t apparent before they went, it soon did become apparent that Yugotours was more or less the Yugoslav government, as they seemed to own all the facilities in the whole country that one might want.
Nonetheless., the commentary given by one of their couriers on a coach trip was extraordinary. She gabbled very quickly through what she was supposed to say, about how Yugoslavia was a happy socialist country with two alphabets, three languages, and six republics, and so on. Then she said “But Eastern Europe is soon going to change”, and she explained to us how in the near future all the communist regimes were going to fall with bloodless revolutions, and the people would become democratic and join the west.
I have no idea how she knew this, unless she was part of a hopeful widespread youth movement which was aiming at it, but of course the whole thing came to pass, more or less. She only really got two things wrong. She thought it would start in Hungary, but it started in East Germany. She thought that it would be successful in all the countries including of course Yugoslavia, but tragically the mildest communist government, the one in Belgrade, had different ideas, and did resist.