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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