Tagged: Iraq

April 17th, 2017 Related News

Rev. Graham: The city of Qaraqosh in Iraq had 50,000 Christians in 2014, now 7 families remain

(CNS NEWS) — By Michael W. Chapman

During his recent trip to Iraq to celebrate Easter, Reverend Franklin Graham visited the city of Qaraqosh, where in 2014 some 50,000 Christians were forced to flee because of attacks from the Islamic State and where today only about 7 families remain. Because of radical Islam, most of Iraq’s Christian “congregations are now dispersed all over the world,” he said.

In an April 16 post on Facebook, Rev. Graham wrote, “Yesterday we went to the city of Qaraqosh, in Iraq, which used to be home to some 50,000 Christians who were forced to flee for their lives in 2014. Now just a handful, about 7 families, remain.”

“I visited a church that had been burned and destroyed by ISIS and met with the pastor,” said Graham. “Incredibly, in the ashes and debris, we discovered one of our Samaritan’s Purse Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes that had been given to a child there at some point. I couldn’t help but wonder where the child who received this box is today.”

“My heart goes out to the pastors in this region,” he said. “Most of their congregations are now dispersed all over the world. As shepherds they want to be able to help their flocks. They want to be able to care for them and protect them, but until there’s a political settlement there’s no way this is going to happen.”

“Will you join me in praying for them?” said Rev. Graham.

He continued, “We also found charred pages from a Bible. I picked up a section that contained John 20:27 – ‘Then he [Jesus] said to Thomas, Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.’ He’s still saying that to the world today—this Easter Sunday—Believe!”

Franklin Graham is the son of world-renowned evangelist Billy Graham. Franklin Graham runs the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the international Christian aid group Samaritan’s Purse.

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April 1st, 2017 Related News

Fears of Islamic State’s long game persist as caliphate crumbles

(VOA) — By Jeff Seldin

Across much of Iraq and parts of Syria, the Islamic State terror group is in retreat. Yet, Iraqi and U.S. officials tell VOA they have a creeping fear that the larger war is still very much undecided.

To be clear, few worry IS will again be able to make the kind of sudden, massive land grab it did in 2013 and 2014 when, bolstered by tens of thousands of foreign fighters, it captured one Iraqi city after another.

Rather, they fear something more subtle: that the resilient terror group has played the long game well enough that even as its self-declared caliphate teeters on the verge of collapse, it will be a force to reckon with for some time to come.

“They have sleeper cells. They have networks,” Najmaldin Karim, the governor of Iraq’s Kirkuk province, said during a recent visit to Washington. “They exist everywhere.”

The extent to which IS has permeated Iraqi society, despite losing its grip on upward of 65 percent of the territory it once controlled, is difficult to estimate. But Iraqi and U.S. officials caution that IS has found ways to slip past even the most watchful eyes.

Teenage fighters

Perhaps the terror group’s most successful and insidious tactic is its use of teenagers, young enough to avoid suspicion but old enough to be highly effective. U.S. and Iraqi officials describe them as the first wave of brainwashed youth truly capable of serving IS’s cause.

“Those who were 14 or 15 years old when ISIS came, now they are very active,” Karim said, describing them as hardened veterans.

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March 26th, 2017 Related News

Vicar of Baghdad: ‘It is over, no Christians will be left’ in Iraq

(CREEPING SHARIA) — He is one of the world’s most prominent priests, but Canon Andrew White – known as the “Vicar of Baghdad” – has reached a painstaking conclusion: Christianity is all but over in the land where it all began.

“The time has come where it is over, no Christians will be left. Some stay Christians should stay to maintain the historical presence, but it has become very difficult. The future for the community is very limited,” White told Fox News this week. “The Christians coming out of Iraq and ISIS areas in the Middle East all say the same thing, there is no way they are ever going back. They have had enough.”

Thirty years ago, there were approximately 1.4 million Christians in Iraq. The number dwindled to around 1 million after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, and a year ago it was estimated that there were less than 250,000 left. Numbers have continued to decline as families flee, and today even approximate figures are difficult to obtain.

“If there is anything I can tell Americans it is that your fellow brothers and sisters are suffering, they are desperate for help,” he said. “And it is not just a matter of praying for peace. They need a lot – food, resources, clothes, everything. They need everything.”

For decades, Christians endured persecution in Iraq by hardline extremists as infidel “people of the book” – but their fate became significantly more dire in 2014 after ISIS overran Mosul and the many ancient Christian villages surrounding the city. Thousands of families overnight were forced to flee their home, and while some have sought refuge in the northern Kurdish region, many have left the country altogether.

“A lot of these guys I have known before they were ISIS, when they were part of militias like ‘Sons of Iraq,’” he said. “They operate in secret cells all over Baghdad, and the harder the Iraqi Army attacks Mosul, the more they attack Baghdad.”

And, White stressed, there simply isn’t a “safe” way to work with them.

“It is important to find ways to engage with them, to look into their philosophies. I tried to invite some of the ISIS jihadists to dinner once,” he added. “They told me they would come, but that they would chop my head off afterwards. I didn’t think it would be a nice way to end a dinner party.”

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March 25th, 2017 Related News

Turning kids into killers: Islamic State creates lost generation of Iraqi youth

(MIDDLE EAST EYE) — Mosul, Iraq – Hasan thought he had seen everything after fighting Islamic State in Fallujah in Tikrit. Then he came to Mosul, and a boy no older then 10 tried to kill him.

“It was utterly shocking,” said the 40-year-old soldier, dragging nervously on a cigarette as he remembers the child among a group of young IS suicide bombers.

“I found myself in front of children full of hatred. They all had explosive belts and they were all ready to die. It isn’t anything like killing an adult. But we had to do it.

“It’s a cruelty that has no end. For us it is a violent pain, we know we have to fight against children who have been indoctrinated in the name of a sick religion.”

This is the reality of war in northern Iraq, where IS is throwing everything – and everyone – at Iraqi forces as they slowly take back Mosul and the surrounding areas in a bitter war that has destroyed the very social fabric of the city.

Children have been spared nothing: poverty, malnutrition and cruelty under IS control; then forced onto the frontlines to be used as spotters, fighters, human shields and suicide bombers as the battles began to rage.

These are tactics that have destroyed family life in the city and its surrounding villages, where IS scooped up youngsters to teach them the ways of their “Caliph”.

In Hamam al-Alil, south of Mosul, Amir tells Middle East Eye of his own son, Mushak, who swore allegiance aged 11 soon after IS arrived in 2014.

“My children had never gone to school,” he said, his face a contortion of fatigue and pain.

“When Daesh arrived my son was a boy full of anger, he could not read or write. They taught him the hatred of the infidels. They taught him to kill.

“In two-and-a-half years he became a soldier of the Islamic police. He wasn’t even 14. I tried to stop him swearing allegiance to the Caliph, and he told me: ‘Shut up or I’ll cut your head’.”

“One day he came home with a gun and threatened me – an armed child who comes into the house saying I cannot criticise Daesh – and broke his mother’s arm as she begged him to stop.”

All villages had recruiters, said Amir, adding that more than half of the children of Hamam al-Alil have been recruited, many of them never been seen again.

Amir has lost his son: “I’m not scared he is dead. I do not care. Mushak is the shame of our family.

“Now here everybody hate us, we are desperate, we can not even go to the shop, we live locked in the house, for fear of being lynched in the street. We lost everything, a son, home, dignity, everything.”

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February 26th, 2017 Breaking News

Iraqi sinkhole mass grave for 4,000 ISIS victims

(RT) — The bodies of some 4,000 Islamic State victims have been buried in the Khasfa sinkhole in Iraq’s desert, making it the country’s largest mass grave, according to locals, police, and activists, as cited by The Telegraph.

The sinkhole is located near the Baghdad-Mosul highway, only eight kilometers from Mosul, the daily reports.

Witnesses and police, as well as human rights organizations, say that Islamic State (IS, Daesh, formerly ISIS/ISIL) murdered and dumped the bodies of thousands of Iraqi troops into the sinkhole after they captured Mosul three years ago.

The majority were shot and thrown into the pit, locals said.

“Daesh would drive the victims to Khasfa in convoys of minibuses, trucks and pickups. The men had their hands bound and their eyes blindfolded. They were taken to the sinkhole and shot in the back of the head,” 40-year-old local villager Mahmoud told The Daily Telegraph.

The terrorist killers were masked, the witness added.

Earlier this week, the Telegraph reportedly went to the Khasfa sinkhole following the recapture of the western half of Mosul by Iraqi troops.

The city has been under IS control since 2014, and the offensive to retake it began in October.

On Friday, Iraqi forces seized the city’s airport.

Over the past years, IS is believed to have conducted a campaign to hunt down and murder policemen and soldiers and toss them into mass graves in the desert.

Human Rights Watch reported last November that IS had executed at least 300 policemen and buried them in a mass grave some 30 kilometers from Mosul.

Another mass grave containing 100 beheaded bodies was found earlier that month in a school just outside of Mosul.

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February 20th, 2017 Breaking News

ISIS radical claiming to have raped 200 women explains: ‘Young men need this, it’s normal’

(CHRISTIAN POST) — A captured Islamic State terror group soldier, who claims to have raped over 200 women and killed as many as 500 people in total, tried to explain that the reason IS carries out mass rape of women and children is because “young men need this.”

(Photo: Reuters)Amar Hussein, 21, a captured IS militant in this undated photo.

Amar Hussein, the militant who was captured in October during an assault on the city of Kirkuk in Iraq, spoke with Reuters about his experiences, revealing that IS commanders gave soldiers permission to rape as many Yazidi women and other minorities as they wanted.

“Young men need this,” Hussein apparently said. “This is normal.”

The jihadist explained that militants were able to rape so many women because they moved from house to house in the captured cities in Iraq, taking women and children as sex slaves, while killing the men.

“We shot whoever we needed to shoot and beheaded whoever we needed to behead,” he added.

Hussein, who was first taken to be a jihadi fighter at 14 years of age, recalled that IS leaders trained soldiers to kill people, and although at first it was difficult for him to obey such orders, it got easier the more he did it.

“Seven, eight, 10 at a time, 30 or 40 people,” he described. “We would take them in the desert and kill them.”

While Hussein’s claims of how many women he has raped and people in total he has killed are yet to be verified, several major international organizations have documented the mass enslavement and rape of women and children that goes on in captured IS territory.

Documents obtained by The Washington Post earlier in February revealed that IS keeps detailed records of its fighters, categorizing them by blood types and listing out how many “slave girls” each is allowed to own.

Survivors who have escaped IS, such as humans rights defender Nadia Murad, have been sharing their horrific stories of abuse.

“We didn’t feel valued as humans in their hands,” Murad, whose Yazidi family was shot in front of her, said in an interview.

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February 6th, 2017 Related News

Eyewitness: Life Under ISIS

(CLARION PROJECT) — On February 5, we reported on the ‘biting women’ of ISIS. This time we take a look at the broader treatment of civilians by ISIS:

S, a young lawyer from Mosul, fell from her ladder and needed medical attention. “I was in pain but didn’t go to see a doctor because I couldn’t stand the sight of all the ISIS men in the clinics,” she told the Russian news agency Sputnik.

Even patients were reportedly assaulted by the men and women of Islamic State; foreigners took the brunt of the violence.

The first year Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL) took control of Mosul, S would stay at home watching TV or using the internet. However, after that, ISIS cut off all outside communication.

If a number of ISIS men gathered on the street where S lived she knew that would spell trouble. It meant house searches and more.

The male members of the morality police would pick on men with light, wispy beards or those wearing short sleeves. Smoking was also forbidden. Violators would be beaten and fined. The poor were whipped the most and sent to work in cemeteries.

One who spoke against ISIS or one of its members could face execution. Alternatively, they could have their mouths sewn up.

“There was no recreational place for families, especially for kids in Mosul,” said S. “Even the promenades were empty because of all the morality police that would hang around there.”

This had a negative impact of the children’s physical and mental well being and development, she said.

Most children did not receive vaccinations, and many died because of the terrible conditions of the hospitals, lack of medications, services and the regular power cuts.

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December 9th, 2016 Breaking News

READY TO STRIKE: ISIS has flooded Europe with 1,500 highly-trained terrorists ‘ready to launch attacks’, chilling EU report claims

(THE SUN) — An estimated 5,000 European ISIS fanatics went to Syria and Iraq and 15 to 20 per cent of them died on the battlefield.

Around 30 to 35 per cent have returned with “specific missions,” while the other half remained in the battle theater – which amounted to between 2,000 and 2,500 Europeans.

This means as many as 1,750 may have returned, based on the percentages listed in the report which EU counter-terrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerchove will present to EU interior ministers on Friday.

The report said there were two types of ‘foreign terrorist fighters’ returning.

Around a third of the estimated 5,000 European jihadists have returned to Europe – some may have ‘orders to attack’

Earlier this year, three coordinated suicide bombings occurred in Belgium: two at Brussels Airport in Zaventem, and one at Maalbeek metro station in central Brussels
Last month Belgium expressed concern that jihadists were increasingly returning to Europe

Last month Belgium expressed concern that jihadists were increasingly returning to Europe

It warned: “It is important to share information on returnees who are already back in Europe, those that are in transit and … (those) still in the conflict zone.”

“There are largely two categories of returnees: those in the majority who will drift back and those who will be sent back on specific missions, which are of most concern.”

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November 18th, 2016 Breaking News

Former Muslims of Norway form group, speak out against Islam

(SPEISA) — On Thursday night, Ex-Muslim of Norway showcased their work and the need for ex-Muslims in the public debate in Norway – and the rest of the world.

– It is the first time we have a public meeting. We want to explain why we have started the association and what we stand for. And to say a little about the kind of challenges we face, both in Norway and elsewhere. We want to normalize criticism of Islam and normalize leaving Islam, says Cemal Yucel Knudsen (pictured) to Nettavisen.

Cemal Yucel Knudsen comes from Turkey and has Kurdish origin. He is a former Islamist and was active in the youth branch of Milli Gorus in Turkey. He is now an ex-Muslim, atheist, social commentator, leader and founder of EX-MN.

Lily Bandehy (pictured) is a refugee from the Islamic regime in Iran. She is deputy leader of EX-MN, an author, feminist, social commentator and Islam critic, with her own blog.

Walid al-Kubaisi is a refugee from Iraq and a board member of EX-MN, author, journalist, a regular columnist, social commentator, Islam critic, lecturer, and winner of the Freedom of Expression Prize 2016.

Eystein Emberland is a board member of EX-MN. He is a humanist, religion critic and one of the founders of the organization Secular Forum.

Leaving Islam does not come without consequences, and the penalty is non other than death. Therefore it goes without saying that these people are very brave, and they are certainly contributing to the current ongoing debate.

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April 23rd, 2016 News You Can Use

GINGRICH: Why America needs to get ready for a ‘100-year war’ with radical Islam

(DAILY CALLER via THE COUNTER JIHAD REPORT) by Russ Read

The war against radical Islamic terrorism could go on much longer than anyone is expecting, and the enemy may not give the U.S. any choice but to fight it.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was quite sober in his address Wednesday on the subject of the politics of dealing with radical Islam. Speaking to a room of people packed to the brim on Capitol Hill, Gingrich outlined in a clear and concise manner his belief that combating the terrorist forces within radical Islam will take as many as 100 years. He noted that the choice to go to war had already been made by the enemy, and the U.S. will eventually have no choice but to respond in a massive way.

Though he certainly had ample criticism for President Barack Obama’s current strategies for countering terrorism, calling the President “delusional,” he was willing to point blame for the current situation in multiple directions. “You have to look seriously at why did we fail in Iraq … in Afghanistan.” Gingrich believes that the commission set up to investigate the attacks on September 11, 2001, failed. So too did both Bush and Clinton, and especially Paul Bremer, Bush’s envoy to Iraq after the initial 2003 invasion.

He opened his remarks with a comparison of today’s time to that of former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain just before the outset of World War II. Unlike others who have attempted to draw the comparison as a slight, the former history professor took a different tack.

“Chamberlain was not weak” he explained, referring to the former prime minister crushing his opposition in parliament at the outset of the war, “[he believed] almost any future was worth getting to that did not involve World War II.”

Gingrich said Chamberlain certainly had a point, highlighting the massive death and destruction left in the wake of the conflict. “Look at the scale of World War II, you cant argue that it was successful,” he explained.

He outlined the point that people knew then that another war was going to be bloody, much like those who look at the war on terrorism realize its going to be bloody now.

“It’s not irrational to ask how to avoid that,” said Gingrich, “we could be involved in a 70 to 100 year war … this is going to be hard to communicate,” he continued.

Reality, though, sometimes trumps one’s preferences, and Gingrich believes that the reality of the threat posed by Islamic radicalism and the terrorism it spawns requires a very difficult, and bloody, form of vigilance.

“We are having a difficult time coming to grips with how large this problem is … this is a clash of civilizations,” he said.

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