ASSYRIAN COMMUNITY ‘AT RISK OF EXTINCTION’ FROM ISLAMIC STATE

Wednesday, February 25th, 2015

People from the Yezidi community flee from massacres by Islamic State
forces towards the Syrian border. Syria’s Assyrian community fears
a similar fate if nothing is done to stop the Islamic State. (Photo:
Reuters)

HASAKAH, Syria (RFE/RL)–An Assyrian Christian organization has warned
that Syria’s Assyrian community could face a mass killing and has
called on the international community to intervene, after militants
from the Islamic State (IS) group abducted Assyrian Christians from
villages in Syria’s Hasakah Province.

Karam Dola, a member of the Assyrian Democratic Organization in Hasakah
Province told Radio Free Iraq reporter Manar Abdulrazzaq on February
24 that militants had overran rural villages populated by Assyrian
Christians at dawn on February 23.

“In Tel Hormuz there were not many families, but there were more
than 13 people, elderly men, women and children who were kidnapped,”
Dola said.

According to Dola, up to 90 people from the village of Tel Shamiram
are also considered missing.

“They were unable to escape when [the IS group] overran the area at
dawn,” Dola added.

The British-based group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR),
which monitors the violence in Syria via a network of contacts, also
reported that at least 90 Assyrian Christians had been abducted by
militants in Tel Shamiram and Tel Hormuz.

Moreover, SOHR said that 14 Islamic State militants had been killed
in U.S.-led air strikes east of the town of Tel Hamis in Hasakah.

Dola said that on February 24, 34 villages on the banks of the Khabur
River in Hasakah province had been evacuated and residents moved to
Hasakah town or to the town of Qamishli.

The Assyrian community in Syria is extremely concerned about the
situation, according to Dola, who told Radio Free Iraq that there
are about 600 Assyrian families in Hasakah province.

“We in the Assyrian Democratic Organization have sent out a distress
call to the international community and to all national forces to
immediately intervene and prevent the occurrence of [the] expected
massacre,” Dola said.

Dola warned that the Assyrian community in Syria is “at risk of
extinction.”

According to the pro-opposition Step News Agency, the Islamic State
group’s military commander in Syria, the Georgian-born ethnic Chechen
Kist Umar Shishani, is leading the offensive in Hasakah. That news,
which is plausible based on previous offensives in northern Syria, has
not been independently reported on pro-Islamic State Russian-language
social media.

From: Baghdasarian