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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Is This the End of Christianity in the Middle East?

By Eliza Griswold

ISIS and other extremist movements across the region are enslaving, killing and uprooting Christians, with no aid in sight…… ISIS broke into stores and looted them. Over the next two weeks, militants rooted out most of the residents cowering in their homes, searching house to house. The armed men roamed Qaraqosh on foot and in pickups. They marked the walls of farms and businesses ‘‘Property of the Islamic State.’’ ISIS now held not just Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, but also Ramadi and Fallujah. (During the Iraq War, the fighting in these three places accounted for 30 percent of U.S. casualties.) In Qaraqosh, as in Mosul, ISIS offered residents a choice: They could either convert or pay the jizya, the head tax levied against all ‘‘People of the Book’’: Christians, Zoroastrians and Jews. If they refused, they would be killed, raped or enslaved, their wealth taken as spoils of war……. Aida has told this story before with slight variations. As she, her husband and another witness recounted it to me, she was pleading for her daughter (3 yrs. old) when the emir himself appeared, flanked by two fighters. He was holding Christina against his chest. Aida fought her way off the bus.

‘‘Please give me my daughter,’’ she said.
The emir cocked his head at his bodyguards.
‘‘Get on the bus before we kill you,’’ one said.
Christina reached for her mother.
‘‘Get on the bus before we slaughter your family,’’ he repeated……To Read More….

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