Islamic State In Syria Abducts At Least 90 Christians - Monitor

[Purveyor]

Source: REUTERS

By Suleiman Al-Khalidi
AMMAN Tue Feb 24, 2015 4:51pm GMT

(Reuters) - Islamic State militants have abducted at least 90 people from Assyrian Christian villages in northeastern Syria, a monitoring group tracking violence in Syria said on Tuesday.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said they carried out dawn raids on rural villages inhabited by the ancient Christian minority west of Hasaka, a city mainly held by the Kurds.

Syrian Kurdish militia launched two offensives against the militants in northeast Syria on Sunday, helped by U.S.-led air strikes and Iraqi peshmerga.

This part of Syria borders territory controlled by Islamic State in Iraq, where it committed atrocities last year against the Yazidi religious minority.

Read more: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/02/24/uk-mideast-crisis-christians-idUKKBN0LS0MG20150224

[Purveyor]

1. Interesting that there has not been one comment on this thread since posting.

Interesting, indeed!

[Coventina]

2. Maybe because it's getting more and more difficult to keep claiming that ISIS members are really CIA

agents in disguise.

[Purveyor]

3. Odd. I haven't heard of THAT. I do believe some of the "rebels" we have supported

to topple gov't "not to our liking" have turned to ISIL.

[Comrade Grumpy]

4. Atrocity fatigue? Just another day with ISIS.

[eissa]

5. They are more than merely Christians

They are part of the indigenous people of Mesopotamia. The Assyrians have been in their ancestral lands since time immemorial, and they are being wiped away as the world watches:

***OFFICIAL ADFA STATEMENT ON THE ASSYRIAN HOSTAGE CRISIS IN SYRIA***

The Assyrian people (who are also known as the Syriac or Chaldean people and include the Melkites of Syria) are not merely Christians, but indigenous inhabitants of the Middle East. After the Iraq war of 2003, and since the Syrian crisis began, the persecution unleashed on them - including extortion, kidnappings, murder, the ethnic cleansing of entire swathes of Baghdad, the Nineveh Plains, and now much of north-east Syria - has been so vast that their very existence in their ancestral homelands is in grave peril. This persecution has also been unleashed with equal fervour on the other Christian inhabitants of Syria, including Armenians.

We are watching a living history and all that comprises disappear. The villages and towns being ransacked by the Islamic State hold the presence of time and extend rituals and ways of life passed down through generations. The richness of the Assyrian/Syriac language, whose roots are in the great languages of the Fertile Crescent - Akkadian and Aramaic - is born of shared experiences of place and time. The link to the past and the future of our people is our land and our language: with the severance of this link, the Middle East and the entire community of cultures will be forever impoverished, and a heritage that spans the entire history of civilisation will be confined to history books.

We demand the release of the Assyrian hostages. We refuse to accept that there is any legitimate reason for these innocent people to die in the appalling manner that so many other hostages of the Islamic State have died.


http://www.ademandforaction.com/