JEWISH KING JESUS IS COMING AT THE RAPTURE FOR US IN THE CLOUDS-DON'T MISS IT FOR THE WORLD.THE BIBLE TAKEN LITERALLY- WHEN THE PLAIN SENSE MAKES GOOD SENSE-SEEK NO OTHER SENSE-LEST YOU END UP IN NONSENSE.GET SAVED NOW- CALL ON JESUS TODAY.THE ONLY SAVIOR OF THE WHOLE EARTH - NO OTHER.
1 COR 15:23-JESUS THE FIRST FRUITS-CHRISTIANS RAPTURED TO JESUS-FIRST FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT-23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.ROMANS 8:23 And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.(THE PRE-TRIB RAPTURE)
PERSECUSSION,BEHEADINGS
JESUS PERSECUTED BIGTIME
PSALMS 14:1
1
The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt,
they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.
ISAIAH 53:4
4 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
MATTHEW 9:34
34 But the Pharisees said, He casteth out devils through the prince of the devils.
JOHN 8:41
41 Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God.
JOHN 10:20
20 And many of them said, He hath a devil, and is mad; why hear ye him?
PHILIPPIANS 2:10-11(JESUS GETS REVENGE)
10 That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth;
11
And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the
glory of God the Father.(JUDGEMENT SEAT OF CHRIST AND FOR SINNERS, THE
GREAT WHITE THRONE FINAL JUDGEMENT).
WE ARE CHRISTIANS WE WILL BE TREATED THE SAME.
2 TIMOTHY 3:1-5 (WHY WE ARE PERSECUTED BY THE WORLD)
1 This know also, that in the last days perilous (DANGEROUS) times shall come.
2
For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud,
blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,
3 Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,
4 Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;
5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.
MATTHEW 5:10-12
10 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall
say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
12 Rejoice,
and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so
persecuted they the prophets which were before you.
MATTHEW 24:9
9 Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake.
JOHN 15:18-20
18 If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me (JESUS) before it hated you.
19
If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye
are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore
the world hateth you.
20 Remember the word that I said unto you, The
servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they
will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep
yours also.
1 PETER 4:16-19
16 Yet if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God on this behalf.
17
For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God: and
if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the
gospel of God?
18 And if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?
19
Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the
keeping of their souls to him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator.
REVELATION 6:9-11
9
And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls
of them that were slain(BEHEADED) for the word of God, and for the
testimony which they held:
10 And they cried with a loud voice,
saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge
our blood on them that dwell on the earth?
11 And white robes were
given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they
should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and
their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be
fulfilled.
REVELATION 20:4
4 And I saw thrones, and they sat
upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them
that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God,
and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had
received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their
hands;(WILLINGLY-THEY CHOSE THE IMPLANT) and they lived and reigned with
Christ a thousand years.
GENESIS 16:11-12
11 And the angel of
the LORD said unto her,(HAGAR) Behold, thou art with child, and shalt
bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael;(FATHER OF THE ARAB/MUSLIMS)
because the LORD hath heard thy affliction.
12 And he (ISHMAEL) will
be a wild man;(ISLAM IS A FAKE AND DANGEROUS SEX FOR MURDER CULT) his
hand will be against every man,(ISLAM HATES EVERYONE) and every man's
hand against him;(PROTECTING THEMSELVES FROM BEING BEHEADED) and he
(ISHMAEL ARAB/MUSLIM) shall dwell in the presence of all his
brethren.(LITERAL-THE ARABS LIVE WITH THEIR BRETHERN JEWS)
JOHN 16:2
2
They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that
whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.(ISLAM
MURDERS IN THE NAME OF MOON GOD ALLAH OF ISLAM)
Eliza Griswold,
author of a New York Times article titled Is This the End of
Christianity in the Middle East?, went "On The Record" with Greta Van
Susteren to discuss the horrors that Middle Eastern Christians are
experiencing.
http://insider.foxnews.com/2015/07/22/end-christianity-middle-eastIs
This the End of Christianity in the Middle East?-ISIS and other
extremist movements across the region are enslaving, killing and
uprooting Christians, with no aid in sight.-By ELIZA GRISWOLDJULY 22,
2015There was something about Diyaa that his wife’s
brothers didn’t like. He was a tyrant, they said, who, after 14 years of
marriage, wouldn’t let their sister, Rana, 31, have her own mobile
phone. He isolated her from friends and family, guarding her jealously.
Although Diyaa and Rana were both from Qaraqosh, the largest Christian
city in Iraq, they didn’t know each other before their families arranged
their marriage. It hadn’t gone especially well. Rana was childless, and
according to the brothers, Diyaa was cheap. The house he rented was
dilapidated, not fit for their sister to live in.Qaraqosh is on the
Nineveh Plain, a 1,500-square-mile plot of contested land that lies
between Iraq’s Kurdish north and its Arab south. Until last summer, this
was a flourishing city of 50,000, in Iraq’s breadbasket. Wheat fields
and chicken and cattle farms surrounded a town filled with coffee shops,
bars, barbers, gyms and other trappings of modern life.Then, last June,
ISIS took Mosul, less than 20 miles west. The militants painted a red
Arabic ‘‘n,’’ for Nasrane, a slur, on Christian homes. They took over
the municipal water supply, which feeds much of the Nineveh Plain. Many
residents who managed to escape fled to Qaraqosh, bringing with them
tales of summary executions and mass beheadings. The people of Qaraqosh
feared that ISIS would continue to extend the group’s self-styled
caliphate, which now stretches from Turkey’s border with Syria to south
of Fallujah in Iraq, an area roughly the size of Indiana.In the weeks
before advancing on Qaraqosh, ISIS cut the city’s water. As the wells
dried up, some left and others talked about where they might go. In
July, reports that ISIS was about to take Qaraqosh sent thousands
fleeing, but ISIS didn’t arrive, and within a couple of days, most
people returned. Diyaa refused to leave. He was sure ISIS wouldn’t take
the town.A week later, the Kurdish forces, known as the peshmerga, whom
the Iraqi government had charged with defending Qaraqosh, retreated.
(‘‘We didn’t have the weapons to stop them,’’ Jabbar Yawar, the
secretary general of the peshmerga, said later.) The city was
defenseless; the Kurds had not allowed the people of the Nineveh Plain
to arm themselves and had rounded up their weapons months earlier. Tens
of thousands jammed into cars and fled along the narrow highway leading
to the relative safety of Erbil, the Kurdish capital of Northern Iraq,
50 miles away.Piling 10 family members into a Toyota pickup, Rana’s
brothers ran, too. From the road, they called Diyaa repeatedly, pleading
with him to escape with Rana. ‘‘She can’t go,’’ Diyaa told one of
Rana’s brothers, as the brother later recounted to me. ‘‘ISIS isn’t
coming. This is all a lie.’’The next morning Diyaa and Rana woke to a
nearly empty town. Only 100 or so people remained in Qaraqosh, mostly
those too poor, old or ill to travel. A few, like Diyaa, hadn’t taken
the threat seriously. One man passed out drunk in his backyard and woke
the next morning to ISIS taking the town.As Diyaa and Rana hid in their
basement, 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.No one came for Diyaa and Rana. ISIS hadn’t bothered to
search inside their ramshackle house. Then, on the evening of Aug. 21,
word spread that ISIS was willing to offer what they call ‘‘exile and
hardship’’ to the last people in Qaraqosh. They would be cast out of
their homes with nothing, but at least they would survive. A kindly
local mullah was going door to door with the good news. Hoping to save
Diyaa and Rana, their neighbors told him where they were hiding.Diyaa
and Rana readied themselves to leave. The last residents of Qaraqosh
were to report the next morning to the local medical center, to receive
‘‘checkups’’ before being deported from the Islamic State. Everyone knew
the checkups were really body searches to prevent residents from taking
valuables out of Qaraqosh. Before ISIS let residents go — if they let
them go — it was very likely they would steal everything they had, as
residents heard they had done elsewhere.Diyaa and Rana called their
families to let them know what was happening. ‘‘Take nothing with you,’’
her brothers told Diyaa. But Diyaa, as usual, didn’t listen. He stuffed
Rana’s clothes with money, gold, passports and their identity papers.
Although she was terrified of being caught — she could be beheaded for
taking goods from the Islamic State — Rana didn’t protest; she didn’t
dare. According to her brothers, Diyaa could be violent. (Diyaa’s
brother Nimrod disputed this, just as he does Diyaa’s alleged
cheapness.)At 7 the next morning, Diyaa and Rana made the five-minute
walk from their home to Qaraqosh Medical Center Branch No. 2, a yellow
building with red-and-green trim next to the city’s only mosque. As the
crowd gathered, Diyaa phoned both his family and hers. ‘‘We’re standing
in front of the medical center right now,’’ he said, as his
brother-in-law recalled it. ‘‘There are buses and cars here. Thank God,
they’re going to let us go.’’It was a searing day. Temperatures reach as
high as 110 degrees on the Nineveh Plain in summer. By 9 a.m., ISIS had
separated men from women. Seated in the crowd, the local ISIS emir,
Saeed Abbas, surveyed the female prisoners. His eyes lit on Aida Hana
Noah, 43, who was holding her 3-year-old daughter, Christina. Noah said
she felt his gaze and gripped Christina closer. For two weeks, she’d
been at home with her daughter and her husband, Khadr Azzou Abada, 65.
He was blind, and Aida decided that the journey north would be too hard
for him. So she sent her 25-year-old son with her three other children,
who ranged in age from 10 to 13, to safety. She thought Christina too
young to be without her mother.ISIS scanned the separate groups of men
and women. ‘‘You’’ and ‘‘you,’’ they pointed. Some of the captives
realized what ISIS was doing, survivors told me later, dividing the
young and healthy from the older and weak. One, Talal Abdul Ghani,
placed a final call to his family before the fighters confiscated his
phone. He had been publicly whipped for refusing to convert to Islam, as
his sisters, who fled from other towns, later recounted. ‘‘Let me talk
to everybody,’’ he wept. ‘‘I don’t think they’re letting me go.’’ It was
the last time they heard from him.No one was sure where either bus was
going. As the jihadists directed the weaker and older to the first of
two buses, one 49-year-old woman, Sahar, protested that she’d been
separated from her husband, Adel. Although he was 61, he was healthy and
strong and had been held back. One fighter reassured her, saying,
‘‘These others will follow.’’ Sahar, Aida and her blind husband, Khadr,
boarded the first bus. The driver, a man they didn’t know, walked down
the aisle. Without a word, he took Christina from her mother’s arms.
‘‘Please, in the name of God, give her back,’’ Aida pleaded. The driver
carried Christina into the medical center. Then he returned without the
child. As the people in the bus prayed to leave town, Aida kept begging
for Christina. Finally, the driver went inside again. He came back
empty-handed.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 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.As the bus rumbled north out of
town, Aida sat crumpled in a seat next to her husband. Many of the
40-odd people on it began to weep. ‘‘We cried for Christina and
ourselves,’’ Sahar said. The bus took a sharp right toward the Khazir
River that marked an edge of the land ISIS had seized. Several minutes
later, the driver stopped and ordered everyone off.Led by a shepherd who
had traveled this path with his flock, the sick and elderly descended
and began to walk to the Khazir River. The journey took 12 hours.The
second bus — the one filled with the young and healthy — headed north,
too. But instead of turning east, it turned west, toward Mosul. Among
its captives was Diyaa. Rana wasn’t with him. She had been bundled into a
third vehicle, a new four-wheel drive, along with an 18-year-old girl
named Rita, who’d come to Qaraqosh to help her elderly father flee.The
women were driven to Mosul, where, the next day, Rana’s captor called
her brothers. ‘‘If you come near her, I’ll blow the house up. I’m
wearing a suicide vest,’’ he said. Then he passed the phone to Rana, who
whispered, in Syriac, the story of what happened to her. Her brothers
were afraid to ask any questions lest her answers make trouble for her.
She said, ‘‘I’m taking care of a 3-year-old named Christina.’’Syrian
Christian refugees in Beirut, Lebanon, mourn the death of an elderly
man, Benjamin Ishaya. He died of a head wound after being struck by a
militant while fleeing his home village. Credit Peter van
Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York TimesMost of Iraq’s Christians call
themselves Assyrians, Chaldeans or Syriac, different names for a common
ethnicity rooted in the Mesopotamian kingdoms that flourished between
the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers thousands of years before Jesus.
Christianity arrived during the first century, according to Eusebius, an
early church historian who claimed to have translated letters between
Jesus and a Mesopotamian king. Tradition holds that Thomas, one of the
Twelve Apostles, sent Thaddeus, an early Jewish convert, to Mesopotamia
to preach the Gospel.As Christianity grew, it coexisted alongside older
traditions — Judaism, Zoroastrianism and the monotheism of the Druze,
Yazidis and Mandeans, among others — all of which survive in the region,
though in vastly diminished form. From Greece to Egypt, this was the
eastern half of Christendom, a fractious community divided by doctrinal
differences that persist today: various Catholic churches (those who
look to Rome for guidance, and those who don’t); the Eastern and
Oriental Orthodox (those who believe Jesus has two natures, human and
divine, and those who believe he was solely divine); and the Assyrian
Church of the East, which is neither Catholic nor Orthodox.When the
first Islamic armies arrived from the Arabian Peninsula during the
seventh century, the Assyrian Church of the East was sending
missionaries to China, India and Mongolia. The shift from Christianity
to Islam happened gradually. Much as the worship of Eastern cults
largely gave way to Christianity, Christianity gave way to Islam. Under
Islamic rule, Eastern Christians lived as protected people, dhimmi: They
were subservient and had to pay the jizya, but were often allowed to
observe practices forbidden by Islam, including eating pork and drinking
alcohol. Muslim rulers tended to be more tolerant of minorities than
their Christian counterparts, and for 1,500 years, different religions
thrived side by side.One hundred years ago, the fall of the Ottoman
Empire and World War I ushered in the greatest period of violence
against Christians in the region. The genocide waged by the Young Turks
in the name of nationalism, not religion, left at least two million
Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks dead. Nearly all were Christian. Among
those who survived, many of the better educated left for the West.
Others settled in Iraq and Syria, where they were protected by the
military dictators who courted these often economically powerful
minorities.From 1910 to 2010, the number of Christians in the Middle
East — in countries like Egypt, Israel, Palestine and Jordan — continued
to decline; once 14 percent of the population, Christians now make up
roughly 4 percent. (In Iran and Turkey, they’re all but gone.) In
Lebanon, the only country in the region where Christians hold
significant political power, their numbers have shrunk over the past
century, to 34 percent from 78 percent of the population. Low birthrates
have contributed to this decline, as well as hostile political
environments and economic crisis. Fear is also a driver. The rise of
extremist groups, as well as the perception that their communities are
vanishing, causes people to leave.For more than a decade, extremists
have targeted Christians and other minorities, who often serve as
stand-ins for the West. This was especially true in Iraq after the U.S.
invasion, which caused hundreds of thousands to flee. ‘‘Since 2003,
we’ve lost priests, bishops and more than 60 churches were bombed,’’
Bashar Warda, the Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Erbil, said. With the
fall of Saddam Hussein, Christians began to leave Iraq in large numbers,
and the population shrank to less than 500,000 today from as many as
1.5 million in 2003.The Arab Spring only made things worse. As dictators
like Mubarak in Egypt and Qaddafi in Libya were toppled, their
longstanding protection of minorities also ended. Now, ISIS is looking
to eradicate Christians and other minorities altogether. The group
twists the early history of Christians in the region — their subjugation
by the sword — to legitimize its millenarian enterprise. Recently, ISIS
posted videos delineating the second-class status of Christians in the
caliphate. Those unwilling to pay the jizya tax or to convert would be
destroyed, the narrator warned, as the videos culminated in the
now-infamous scenes of Egyptian and Ethiopian Christians in Libya being
marched onto the beach and beheaded, their blood running into the
surf.The future of Christianity in the region of its birth is now
uncertain. ‘‘How much longer can we flee before we and other minorities
become a story in a history book?’’ says Nuri Kino, a journalist and
founder of the advocacy group Demand for Action. According to a Pew
study, more Christians are now faced with religious persecution than at
any time since their early history. ‘‘ISIL has put a spotlight on the
issue,’’ says Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat in the U.S. House of
Representatives, whose parents are from the region and who advocates on
behalf of Eastern Christians. ‘‘Christianity is under an existential
threat.’’One of the main pipelines for Christians fleeing the Middle
East runs through Lebanon. This spring, thousands of Christians from
villages in northeastern Syria along the Khabur River found shelter in
Lebanon as they fled an ISIS assault in which 230 people were seized for
ransom. This wasn’t the first time that members of this tight-knit
community had been driven from their homes. Many of these villagers were
descendants of those who, in 1933, fled Iraq after a massacre of
Assyrian Christians left 3,000 dead in one day.On a recent Saturday, 50
of these refugees gathered for a funeral at the Assyrian Church of the
East in Beirut, which sits on the steep slope of Mount Lebanon, not far
from a BMW-Mini Cooper dealership and a Miss Virgin Jeans shop. The
priest, the Rev. Sargon Zoumaya, buttoned his black cassock over a blue
clerical shirt as he prepared to officiate over the burial of Benjamin
Ishaya, who arrived just months before, displaced from one of the
villages ISIS attacked. (He had died of complications following a head
wound inflicted by a jihadist.)‘‘We’re afraid our whole society will
vanish,’’ said Zoumaya, who left his Khabur River village more than a
decade ago to study in Lebanon. He picked up his prayer book and headed
downstairs to the parish house. The church was helping to care for 1,500
Syrian families. ‘‘It’s too much pressure on us, more than we can
handle,’’ he said. The families didn’t want to live in the notoriously
overcrowded Lebanese refugee camps that had filled with one-and-a-half
million Syrians fleeing the civil war. They no longer wanted to live
among Muslims. Instead they crammed into apartments with exorbitant
rents that the church subsidized as best it could.Inside the church, men
and women sat in two separate circles. A young woman passed out Turkish
coffee in paper cups. Waves of keening rose from the ring of women, led
by Ishaya’s widow. Wearing an olive green suit, she sat at the head of
the open coffin, weeping, as women touched her husband’s body. Nearby,
her son, Bassam Ishaya, nursed two broken feet. He’d been trying to
support his family by repairing couches until one dropped on him. The
Ishaya family left Syria with nothing. ISIS, Bassam said, told them they
‘‘either had to pay the jizya, convert or be killed.’’ He pointed to a
blue crucifix tattoo on his right arm. ‘‘Because of this, I had to wear
long sleeves,’’ he said.To escape, the Ishayas were airlifted from
Al-Hasakah, a town in northeastern Syria, which had been under the joint
control of the Assad government and the Kurds but has since largely
fallen to ISIS, and flown 400 miles to Damascus. From there, they drove
to the Lebanese border. Syrian Air charged $180 for the flights; Assad’s
government charged $50 a person, the refugees at the funeral said.Since
the civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, Assad has allowed Christians
to leave the country. Nearly a third of Syria’s Christians, about
600,000, have found themselves with no choice but to flee the country,
driven out by extremist groups like the Nusra Front and now ISIS. ‘‘As
president, he made the sheep and the wolf walk together,’’ Bassam said.
‘‘We don’t care if he stays or goes, we just want security.’’ Assad has
used the rise of ISIS to solidify his own support among those who
remain, sowing the same fear among them that he tries to spread in the
West: that he is the only thing standing in the way of an ISIS takeover.
This argument has been largely effective. As Samy Gemayel, leader of
the Kataeb party in Lebanon, said: ‘‘When Christians saw Christians
being beheaded, those who saw Assad as the enemy chose the lesser of two
evils. Assad was the diet version of ISIS.’’Like most of the refugees
in the parish house, Bassam wasn’t planning on returning to Syria. He
was searching for a way to the West. His brother Yussef moved to Chicago
two years earlier. He didn’t have a job yet, but his wife worked at
Walmart. Maybe they would help. He wanted to leave like everyone else,
although it would hasten the end of Christianity in Syria. No one would
go home after what ISIS had done. ‘‘Christians will all leave,’’ he
said. ‘‘What can I do? I have four kids, I can’t leave them here to
die.’’After his father’s coffin was sealed, Bassam and the rest of the
male mourners filed out. As the women looked on, the men filled waiting
cars and drove, past a cement factory, to a nearby graveyard. Zoumaya
swung a censer of frankincense along the narrow pathway. But neither the
smoke nor the wilting rose bushes could mask the reek of corpses.
Behind the priest, Bassam hobbled on crutches. The mourners lifted the
coffin into a wall of doors, which resembled the shelving units in a
morgue. This was a pauper’s grave. Since the family couldn’t afford the
fee, the church paid $500 to place the coffin here. In a few months, the
body would be quietly burned, although cremation is anathema to Eastern
Christian doctrine. The ashes would take up less space in this
overcrowded city of the dead.‘‘We ran from the war only to die in the
street,’’ one mourner said.Later, Zoumaya talked of his family members,
who were among the 230 captured by ISIS. At noon, on the day ISIS
arrived in his wife’s village, Zoumaya called his father-in-law to check
in.‘‘This is ISIS,’’ said the man who answered.‘‘Please let my family
go,’’ the priest begged. ‘‘They’ve done nothing to you. They’re not
fighting.’’‘‘These people belong to us now,’’ the man said. ‘‘Who is
this calling?’’Zoumaya hung up. He feared what ISIS might do if they
knew who he was. But this was not the end of his communication with
them; they sent him photographs via WhatsApp. He pulled out his phone to
show them. Here was a jihadi on a motorcycle, grinning in front of the
charred grocery store that belonged to his father. Here was a photo,
before ISIS arrived, of a 3-month-old’s baptism. Here was a snapshot of
the family dressed up for Somikka, Assyrian Halloween, during which
adults don frightening costumes to scare children into fasting for
Lent.‘‘All these people are missing,’’ he said.ISIS wants $23 million
for these captives, $100,000 each, a sum no one can pay.This spring the
U.N. Security Council met to discuss the plight of Iraq’s religious
minorities. ‘‘If we attend to minority rights only after slaughter has
begun, then we have already failed,’’ Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the high
commissioner for Human Rights, said. After the conference ended, there
was mounting anger at American inaction. Although the airstrikes were
effective, since October 2013, the United States has given just $416
million in humanitarian aid, which falls far short of what is needed.
‘‘Americans and the West were telling us they came to bring democracy,
freedom and prosperity,’’ Louis Sako, the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch of
Babylon who addressed the Security Council, wrote to me in a recent
email. ‘‘What we are living is anarchy, war, death and the plight of
three million refugees.’’Of the 3.1 million displaced Iraqis, 85 percent
are Sunnis. No one has suffered more at the hands of ISIS than fellow
Muslims. Other religious minorities have been affected as well and in
large numbers: the Yazidis, who were trapped on Mount Sinjar in Northern
Iraq last summer, as ISIS threatened them with genocide; as well as
Shia Turkmen; Shabak; Kaka’i; and the Mandeans, who follow John the
Baptist. ‘‘Everyone has seen the forced conversions, crucifixions and
beheadings,’’ David Saperstein, the United States ambassador at large
for religious freedom, said. ‘‘To see these communities, primarily
Christians, but also the Yazidis and others, persecuted in such large
numbers is deeply alarming.’’It has been nearly impossible for two U.S.
presidents — Bush, a conservative evangelical; and Obama, a progressive
liberal — to address the plight of Christians explicitly for fear of
appearing to play into the crusader and ‘‘clash of civilizations’’
narratives the West is accused of embracing. In 2007, when Al Qaeda was
kidnapping and killing priests in Mosul, Nina Shea, who was then a U.S.
commissioner for religious freedom, says she approached the secretary of
state at the time, Condoleezza Rice, who told her the United States
didn’t intervene in ‘‘sectarian’’ issues. Rice now says that protecting
religious freedom in Iraq was a priority both for her and for the Bush
administration. But the targeted violence and mass Christian exodus
remained unaddressed. ‘‘One of the blind spots of the Bush
administration was the inability to grapple with this as a direct
byproduct of the invasion,’’ says Timothy Shah, the associate director
of Georgetown University’s Religious Freedom Project.More recently, the
White House has been criticized for eschewing the term ‘‘Christian’’
altogether. The issue of Christian persecution is politically charged;
the Christian right has long used the idea that Christianity is
imperiled to rally its base. When ISIS massacred Egyptian Copts in Libya
this winter, the State Department came under fire for referring to the
victims merely as ‘‘Egyptian citizens.’’ Daniel Philpott, a professor of
political science at the University of Notre Dame, says, ‘‘When ISIS is
no longer said to have religious motivations nor the minorities it
attacks to have religious identities, the Obama administration’s caution
about religion becomes excessive.’’Last fall, Obama did refer to
Christians and other religious minorities by name in a speech, saying,
‘‘we cannot allow these communities to be driven from their ancient
homelands.’’ When ISIS threatened to eradicate the Yazidis, ‘‘it was the
United States that stepped in to beat back the militants,’’ Alistair
Baskey, a spokesman for the National Security Council, says. In
northeastern Syria, where ISIS is still launching attacks against
Assyrian Christian villages, the U.S. military recently come to their
aid, Baskey added. Refugees are a thornier issue. Of the more than
122,000 Iraqi refugees admitted to the United States, nearly 40 percent
already belong to oppressed minorities. Admitting more would be
difficult. ‘‘There are limits to what the international community can
do,’’ Saperstein said.Eshoo, the Democratic congresswoman, is working to
establish priority refugee status for minorities who want to leave
Iraq. ‘‘It’s a hair ball,’’ she says. ‘‘The average time for admittance
to the United States is more than 16 months, and that’s too long. Many
will die.’’ But it can be difficult to rally widespread support. The
Middle East’s Christians often favor Palestine over Israel. And because
support of Israel is central to the Christian Right — Israel must be
occupied by the Jews before Jesus can return — this stance distances
Eastern Christians from a powerful lobby that might otherwise champion
their cause. Recently, Ted Cruz admonished an audience of Middle Eastern
Christians at an In Defense of Christians event in Washington, telling
them that Christians ‘‘have no better ally than the Jewish state.’’ Cruz
was booed.The fate of Christians in the Middle East isn’t simply a
matter of religion; it is also integral to what kinds of societies will
flourish as the region’s map fractures. In Lebanon, for example, where
Christians have always played a powerful role in government, they
increasingly serve as a buffer between Sunni and Shia. For nearly 70
years, Lebanon was a proxy battleground for the conflict between Israel
and Palestine. Across the region, that conflict is now secondary to the
shifting tectonic plates of the Sunni-Shia divide, which threatens
terrible bloodshed.Earlier this year, Lebanon closed its borders to
almost everyone escaping the war in Syria but made an exception for
Christians fleeing ISIS. When the extremists attacked the villages along
the Khabur River, the interior minister, Nouhad Machnouk, ordered the
official in charge of the border to allow Christians to enter the
country. ‘‘I can’t put this in writing,’’ the border official said.
Machnouk replied, ‘‘O.K., say it aloud, word by word.’’Machnouk told me
this story on a recent evening. ‘‘They’re paying much, much, much more
than others,’’ in both Syria and Iraq, he said. ‘‘They’re not Sunni and
not Shia, but they’re paying more than both.’’ We sat in his airy
office, housed in a former art school from the Ottoman era. It was
decorated with his private collection of Greek and Roman antiquities,
including a carved basalt head with finely wrought curls. For the
minister, a moderate Sunni, sheltering Christians is as much a
sociopolitical imperative as a moral one.In Lebanon, the tension between
Sunni and Shia plays out in a system of political patronage, which has
split the Christian community into two rival political parties, both
born of the country’s 15-year-long civil war. The pro-Saudi Future
movement, which consists of mainly Sunnis, supports the Christian leader
Samir Geagea, who lives atop Mount Lebanon behind three check points,
two X-ray machines and a set of steel doors. Hezbollah, which is Shia
and backed by Iran, has been openly allied since 2006 with the Free
Patriotic Movement (F.P.M.), a Christian Party headed by Michel Aoun.
For Hezbollah, Christians offer an opportunity to forge an alliance with
a fellow minority. (Of the world’s one and a half billion Muslims, only
10 to 20 percent are Shia.)‘‘It’s a political game,’’ Alain Aoun, a
member of Parliament for the F.P.M. and Michel Aoun’s nephew, told me.
The emergence of ISIS has strengthened the alliance. ‘‘The Christians
are happy to have anyone who can fight against I.S.’’ Hezbollah has paid
young Christian men from Lebanon’s impoverished Bekaa Valley a one-time
$500 to $2,000 fee to fight ISIS.‘‘Christians here are making the same
calculation that Obama does,’’ Hanin Ghaddar, the managing editor of
NOW, a news website in Lebanon, said, referring to Obama’s willingness
to support Iran as a bulwark against Sunni extremism. For many
Christians in the Middle East, a Shia alliance offers a hope of
survival, however slim. Ghaddar, an independent Shia, says that it is
uncertain how these tenuous allegiances will play out. This spring,
pro-Iranian forces of Hezbollah were battling Sunni extremists in Syria.
No one knew who would prevail. ‘‘It’s like ‘Game of Thrones,’ ’’ she
said. ‘‘We’re waiting for the snow to melt.’’The front line against ISIS
in Northern Iraq is marked by an earthen berm that runs for hundreds of
miles over the Nineveh Plain. A string of Christian towns now stands
empty, and the Kurdish forces occupy what, for thousands of years, was
Assyrian, Chaldean and Syriac land. In one, Telskuf, seized by ISIS last
year, the main square is overgrown with brambles and thistles. It was
once a thriving market town. Every Thursday, hundreds came to buy
clothes, honey and vegetables. Telskuf was home to 7,000 people; now
only three remain.The Nineveh Plain Forces, a 500-member Assyrian
Christian militia, patrols the town. The N.P.F. is one of five Assyrian
militias formed during the past year after the rout of ISIS. It shares a
double aim with two other militias, Dwekh Nawsha, an all-volunteer
force of around 100, and the Nineveh Plains Protection Units, a
battalion of more than 300: to help liberate Christian lands from ISIS
and to protect their people, possibly as part of a nascent national
guard, when they return home. The two other militias are the Syriac
Military Council, which is fighting alongside the Kurds in northeastern
Syria, and the Babylonian Brigades, which operate under Iraq’s
Shia-dominated militias.A few of these militias are aided by a handful
of American, Canadian and British citizens, who, frustrated with their
governments’ lack of response to ISIS, have traveled to Syria and Iraq
to fight on their own. Some come in the name of fellow Christians. Some
come to relive their roles in the United States invasion of Iraq and
Afghanistan — or to make amends for them. One American named Matthew
VanDyke, the founder of Sons of Liberty International, a security
company, has provided free training for the N.P.U. and is now about to
work with a second militia, Dwekh Nawsha. VanDyke, who is 36, traveled
to Libya in 2011 to fight against Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces; he was
captured and spent 166 days in solitary confinement before escaping and
returning to combat. He has no formal military training, but since last
fall, he has brought American veterans to Iraq to help the N.P.U.,
including James Halterman, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, who found
the group on the Internet after watching a segment about Westerners
fighting ISIS on Fox News. The United States government does not support
groups like VanDyke’s. ‘‘Americans who have traveled to Iraq to fight
are not part of U.S. efforts in the region,’’ Joseph Pennington, the
consul general in Erbil, says. ‘‘We wish they would not come here.’’In
Iraq, the militias operate at the front only with the approval of the
Kurdish peshmerga, who are using the fight against ISIS to expand their
territory into the Nineveh Plain, long a disputed territory between
Arabs and Kurds. Even to travel 1,000 yards between bases and forward
posts, the Christian militias must ask the Kurds for permission. The
Kurds are looking to integrate all the Christian militias into their
force; they have succeeded with the N.P.F. and two others. But the
N.P.U. remains wary. They fear that the Kurds are using the Christian
cause to seize territory for a greater Kurdistan. And because the
Kurdish forces abandoned them as ISIS approached, the militias want the
right to protect their own people. For now, they make do with the help
they can find. Romeo Hakari, the head of the N.P.F., said, ‘‘We want
U.S. trainers, but we can’t even afford to buy weapons.’’ After his
militia purchased 20 AK-47s in an open market in Erbil, the Kurds gave
them 100 more.Other than a daily mortar or two launched by ISIS from a
village a mile and a half away, the area the N.P.U. patrolled was a
sleepy target. After coalition airstrikes pushed ISIS out of Telskuf
last summer, the group retreated about a mile and a half to the
southwest. Beyond a bulldozed trench and a line of burlap sandbags
littered with sunflower-seed shells, 12 black flags fluttered over a
village. Three weeks earlier, at 4:20 a.m., two suicide bombers carrying
a ladder to place over the trench attacked this forward post. The
suicide attack was foiled after the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS
launched airstrikes, which killed 13 ISIS fighters, Manaf Yussef, a
Kurdish security official in charge of this front, said. ‘‘Without
airstrikes, we’d lose,’’ he said. Minutes later, a high whistle signaled
an incoming ISIS shell, which set fire to a nearby wheat field. The
land is sere due to a drought.As a column of smoke from the daily ISIS
shell billowed into the blue sky, five Assyrian fighters belonging to
the Nineveh Plain Forces went from house to house to evacuate the last
residents of Telskuf — three old women. When the N.P.F. commander, Safaa
Khamro, pushed open the door of the first house, Christina Jibbo
Kakhosh began to cry. She was 91.‘‘I have no running water,’’ she said.
Less than four feet tall, she peered up at Khamro through bottle-thick
glasses.‘‘I fixed it for you yesterday,’’ Khamro said.‘‘I forgot,’’ she
said. She shuffled back inside and beckoned him to follow. Her
refrigerator was flung open; because there was no electricity, it served
as a pantry. A half-eaten jar of tahini, a lighter and a pair of
scissors sat on a table in front of the mattress on which she slept.
When she heard her visitors were American, she said: ‘‘Three of my
children are in America. Only one has called me.’’Khamro tried to
persuade her to come to a house near the base where she would be safer.
‘‘It has satellite TV,’’ he said. She packed a small satchel and left
with the patrol. ‘‘That’s my uncle’s house,’’ one Assyrian fighter said
as he passed a padlocked gate. ‘‘He’s in Australia now.’’ The patrol
passed St. Jacob’s Church, where ISIS fighters had destroyed a porcelain
statue of Jesus, which was now missing its face. An icon of a martyr
having his fingers cut off by Tamerlane, who massacred tens of thousands
of Assyrian Christians during the 14th century, hung on the
wall.Nearby, the N.P.F. had replaced the cross that ISIS fighters filmed
themselves hurling down. Khamro was a politician in Telskuf before ISIS
invaded. He owned one of the 480 now-shuttered shops, a boutique that
sold women’s and children’s clothes. He’d sent his wife and children to
Al Qosh, 10 miles to the north, a safer Christian city.Khamro turned off
the main drag and into a warren of overgrown pathways. He stopped
before a chicken-wire awning, calling out ‘‘Auntie’’ to Kamala Karim
Shaya, who sat on her front stoop, a kerchief tied over her thick white
ponytail. When she learned that Khamro had come to move her out of her
clay home, she began to scream: ‘‘Even if my father stands up in his
grave, I will not leave this house. No, no, no, no, no, never, never,
never,’’ she shouted. Khamro, who refused to move her by force, had no
choice but to pass on.Even if ISIS is defeated, the fate of religious
minorities in Syria and Iraq remains bleak. Unless minorities are given
some measure of security, those who can leave are likely to do so. Nina
Shea of the Hudson Institute, a conservative policy center, says that
the situation has grown so dire that Iraqi Christians must either be
allowed full residency in Kurdistan, including the right to work, or
helped to leave. Others argue that it is essential that minorities have
their own autonomous region. Exile is a death knell for these
communities, activists say. ‘‘We’ve been here as an ethnicity for 6,000
years and as Christians for 1,700 years,’’ says Dr. Srood Maqdasy, a
member of the Kurdish Parliament. ‘‘We have our own culture, language
and tradition. If we live within other communities, all of this will be
dissolved within two generations.’’The practical solution, according to
many Assyrian Christians, is to establish a safe haven on the Nineveh
Plain. ‘‘If the West could take in so many refugees and the U.N.H.C.R.
handle an operation like that, then we wouldn’t ask for a permanent
solution,’’ says Nuri Kino, of A Demand for Action. ‘‘But the most
realistic option is returning home.’’‘‘We don’t have time to wait for
solutions,’’ said the Rev. Emanuel Youkhana, the head of Christian Aid
Program Northern Iraq. ‘‘For the first time in 2,000 years, there are no
church services in Mosul. The West comes up with one solution by
granting visas to a few hundred people. What about a few hundred
thousand?’’ If Iraq devolves into three regions — Sunnis, Shia and Kurds
— there could be a fourth for minorities. ‘‘Iraq is a forced marriage
between Sunni, Shia, Kurds and Christians, and it failed,’’ Youkhana
said. ‘‘Even I, as a priest, favor divorce.’’Proponents say a safe haven
wouldn’t require an international force or a no-fly zone, neither of
which is likely to find much support in the United States or among its
allies. U.S. policy does play a role. When Congress was asked to approve
$1.6 billion in aid for Iraqi forces fighting ISIS — the Iraqi Army,
the Kurds and the Sunni tribes — it amended the bill to explicitly
include local forces on the Nineveh Plain, but also passed legislation
directing the State Department to implement a safe haven there.
Ultimately, however, the responsibility lies with the Iraqis.
Pennington, the consul general, said, ‘‘The creation of a safe haven in
the Nineveh Province would be an idea for the Iraqi Parliament in
accordance with the Iraqi Constitution.’’Tarek Mitri, a former Lebanese
minister and a former special representative to the U.N. secretary
general for Libya, says that his impression in speaking to officials in
the White House ‘‘is that Obama is in a withdrawal mood. He thinks that
he was elected to withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq and to make a deal
with Iran. If this is the mood, then we shouldn’t expect much or ask
much from the Americans.’’ Baskey, of the National Security Council,
counters that ‘‘rather than withdrawing, the president and this
administration have, in fact, remained deeply engaged, building and
leading a coalition of some 60 nations to degrade and ultimately destroy
ISIL.’’The last time Rana, one of the women taken by ISIS from
Qaraqosh, was able to speak to her family by phone was in September. She
told them what had befallen Rita and Christina. Rita had been given as a
slave to a powerful member of ISIS; Christina was given to a family to
be raised as a Muslim.Rana said little about her own circumstances, and
her family didn’t ask. To be honest, they weren’t sure they wanted to
know what ISIS had done to her.For months now, the phone Rana used has
been switched off. ‘‘There’s word they’re still alive,’’ Rabee Mano, 36,
a refugee from Qaraqosh who runs an underground railroad out of the
Islamic State, told me one recent evening over beer and kebabs. ‘‘She’s
been ‘married’ to a powerful guy in ISIS,’’ he added, as he sat in the
garden at the Social Academic Center in Ankawa, a Christian suburb of
Erbil. At the next table, three gleeful men poured straight vodka into
plastic cups. Over the past year, Ankawa has swelled by 60,000 as
refugees have poured in.For nearly a year, Mano has been trying to buy
freedom for Rana, Rita and Christina from ISIS. Through his network of
contacts, a greedy ISIS member, friends in Arab villages and a brave
taxi driver, Mano has paid to free 45 people. The haggling is made
easier by the fact that ISIS members frequently trade women among
themselves, so the buying and selling of people doesn’t raise suspicion.
This work has cost him $10,000, which he raised by opening a carwash.
He sent $800 to a member of ISIS, saying he would send more when the
women and the child made it to safety. But the man had done nothing of
what he promised.Before Mano fled his hometown last August, he dealt in
commercial real estate. ‘‘You can see my buildings from Google Earth,’’
he said. At the picnic table, he pulled an expired Arizona driver’s
license from his wallet. It was a temporary license from 2011, the year
he came to the United States and tried to buy 48 apartments. The deal
fell through, so he went home; now his passport had expired. He lost
about $1.5 million, he said.He longed to return to the Nineveh Plain.
‘‘Even though all of my money is in the garbage, I’ll be O.K. if we get
this safe haven,’’ he said. ‘‘If it takes too long, we’ll be
annihilated.’’ It was all he thought about. ‘‘Are we going home or
not?’’ he asked. ‘‘This safe haven is the last chance we have, or
Christianity will be finished in Iraq.’’Earlier, a text message came in
from Mosul. One of his contacts was having trouble locating a woman
named Nabila, who was ready to be smuggled to safety. Mano had
instructed her to hang a black cloth in her window so that her rescuer
could find the right house. But the wind had blown the cloth to the
ground, and now her would-be rescuer couldn’t tell where she was being
held. They would have to try again. ‘‘I’ll tell her to hang a blanket,’’
Mano said. They would find her, he hoped, if the blanket held its
weight against the wind.Eliza Griswold is the author of ‘‘The Tenth
Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and
Islam.’’A version of this article appears in print on July 26, 2015, on
page MM31 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Shadow of
Death..
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