ISLAMIC STATE OVERRUNS HISTORIC CHRISTIAN AREA IN SYRIA, ABDUCTS 90

Dalje.com , Croatia
Feb 24 2015

Islamic State extremists have abducted at least 90 Christians after
storming villages in the historic heartland of the country’s Assyrian
minority, a monitoring group said Tuesday.

Villagers fled the jihadist advance, launched early on Monday, to
the cities of al-Hassakeh and Qamishli where they were sheltered by
local churches.

“There are dozens of families whose fate is still not known,” one of
the refugees, Shmouna Yunan, told dpa by phone from al-Hassakeh.

“Terror is everywhere in our areas, the sound of bullets has been
keeping our children awake.”

A local Assyrian militia which fights alongside Kurdish forces said
they were trying to recapture villages along the Khabur river west
of al-Hassakeh seized by the jihadists.

A spokesman for the Syriac Military Council said it did not yet have
an estimate for the number of people abducted. The Syrian Observatory
for Human Rights put the number at at least 90.

The Britain-based group earlier said its sources had heard Islamic
State fighters in conversation on walkie-talkies discussing the
capture of “56 crusader prisoners.”

An official of the Assyrian Church in Beirut, who asked not to be
named, said that four churches – one of them among the oldest in
Syria – had been burned down by the jihadists.

The curate of one al-Hassakeh church appealed for aid for the refugees,
saying the local churches were not able to cope with the influx.

“The weather is cold and there is nowhere warm for them to stay. Food
and medicine prices are high,” the curate, who asked not to be named,
said. “Syrians, Muslims and Christians alike are faced with a human
tragedy and nobody pays any heed.”

Other refugees said local Christians were being exposed to ethnic
cleansing.

“We are falling victim to genocide, they torture us and expel us
and nobody comes to our aid,” said Ninos Khoshaba, an agricultural
engineer in his 30s, adding that hundreds of families were still
fleeing to Qamishli and al-Hassakeh.

The jihadist assault on the Khabur villages came as the Kurdish
People’s Protection Units claimed advances against Islamic State
north-east of al-Hassakeh.

The Observatory said the Syrian Kurdish forces, backed up by US-led air
raids and cross-border artillery fire from the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga,
had captured 30 settlements from the jihadists in recent days.

The United Nations Monday released a report saying that Islamic State
had committed possible acts of genocide when it targeted Yezidi,
Christian and Shiite communities in Iraq last year.

Earlier this month the group published a video showing its fighters
in Libya beheading 21 mostly Egyptian Christian migrant workers,
whom it also termed “crusaders.”

Assyrian Christians have for centuries lived in several dozen villages
in the fertile land along the banks of the Khabur river west of
al-Hassakeh.

Local sources say that the river forms the effective boundary between
areas controlled by the YPG and those held by Islamic State, and that
many civilians had already left the villages on the south bank.

The Assyrians follow an ancient Eastern Christian rite and speak a
form of Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Their largest communities
are in north-eastern Syria and nearby areas of northern Iraq.

They have suffered several waves of persecution, most notably during
the massacres often referred to as the Armenian Genocide in Turkey
in 1915.