By Todd Daniels
10/02/2015
Washington
D.C. (International Christian Concern) – Historic Christian churches in
Mosul, Iraq were turned into slaughterhouses for ISIS jihadists during the
Islamic Festival of Sacrifice. This comes as just the latest atrocity as ISIS
attempts to erase any presence of Christianity in a city that has nearly 2,000
years of Christian history.
“Nearly
eight churches, including St. Ephrem Syriac Orthodox Church” were used for
slaughtering animals, Jamil Diarbakerli, Head of the Assyrian Monitor for Human
Rights (AMHR) told International Christian Concern (ICC).
“This
incident comes as the new link in the series of violations of the Daash [ISIS]
terrorist organization of churches and religious temples in the city of Mosul
which is controlled by them since the June 10, 2014,” AMHR said in a press
release.
Once home to tens of thousands of
Christians, now not a single Christian is believed to remain in Mosul. Nearly
all Christians fled Mosul when the city fell to ISIS on June 10. An ultimatum was given to the
remaining Christians that they must convert to Islam, pay a tax or leave the
city by noon on July 19 or they would face death.
Since then, ISIS has occupied or destroyed all of the remaining churches and Christian properties or else converted
them into mosques.
According
to eyewitnesses who are still in Mosul, ISIS is going to great lengths to
remove any remnants of the city’s Christian past.
“The cross is ISIS’s main enemy;
that is why today no traces of crosses can be seen in Mosul,”A.S., a journalist writing anonymously told Ankawa News.
“The
dwellings were ravaged with great fury – and the vestiges of this hatred for
Christianity can be seen here to this day… As for churches and monasteries,
whole teams are involved in the job of dynamiting or partially demolishing
their buildings,” A.S. continued.
In June 2015, ISIS announced that
the St. Ephrem Church would be converted into the “mosque of the mujahideen,” a place for its extremist fighters
to pray and worship.
“This
was my church from childhood,” Rita, a Christian from Mosul now living in
Northern Iraq told ICC. “In Christmas and Easter the church was full of people.
This church is the biggest one in Mosul; there would be thousands of people,”
she remembered fondly.
The
Christian community from Mosul, and from the Christian villages of the Nineveh
Plains, are wondering if they will ever be able to go back.
Unless
something dramatic changes they don’t see it as something likely in the near
future.
“The first condition is that
there must be international protection for anybody returning. The second is
that the Christians must be allowed to create their own semi-independent
administrative entity,” Nawzat Shamdeen wrote in a niqash special report on Iraq’s Christians.
The final condition, as Patriarch
Louis Sako outlined in a march 2015 speech to the United Nations Security Council, would be assistance to help them
rebuild their lives in the lands that have been conquered.
Other thinkers have laid out a
similar strategy for Christians to be “rescued, restored, and returned” to their homelands.
Until
that happens, Christians will remain at a loss trying to decide whether to wait
things out or to look towards the West and join the flood of migrants toward
Europe and the United States.
While
they wait, the news coming from their homelands is increasingly gruesome as
ISIS is trying to solidify their hold on territory in Iraq and Syria, slaughtering
not only sheep but those who challenge their control.