Iraqi Christians Fighting ISIS on Their Knees - CBN NEWS

Displaced people from the outskirts of Mosul arrive in the town of Bashiqa, after it was recaptured from the Islamic State, east of Mosul, Iraq. (REUTERS/Khalid al Mousily)

Iraqi Christians Fighting ISIS on Their Knees

 11/18/2016 CBN NEWS

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Kurdish and Iraqi forces are still fighting to break the Islamic State's iron grip on Mosul. Meanwhile, thousands of refugees are fleeing from certain death just miles away from the ISIS stronghold and Iraq's Christians are asking God to restore their land. 

CBN News Military Correspondent Chuck Holton described the scene on the front lines in Northern Iraq.

"We're hearing a lot of explosions and machine gunfire. There are coalition jets circling overhead," he said positioned just miles beyond enemy lines. 

While the scene is full of heavy gunfire, smoke and ground-shaking explosions, it is impossible to ignore the thousands of wounded refugees running for their lives. 

"They've been coming in groups of 10, 20, 30 even 100, waving white flags and surrendering to the Peshmerga," Holton said. "Many of them were told by ISIS that if they went to the Kurdish lines they would be beheaded by the Kurds. The refugees said they would rather die by Kurdish hands than by ISIS." 

The tired and wounded refugees do not receive the sword once they reach Kurdish territory; instead, they get bowls of food and glasses of water. 

"When they get to the Kurdish lines and find out they are well-cared for and given food and water, they just sometimes break down in tears," Holton said. "The wounded people we saw just a little while ago included a man whose wife and brother were killed in a U.S. airstrike. His daughter was with him and lost an arm and an eye."

Although many have escaped, Holton says there are still many trapped in ISIS territory with targets on their backs.  

"ISIS has herded thousands and thousands of people in Mosul into where the fighting is and using them as human shields. There are upwards of 700,000 people still trapped in Mosul," he said. 

Matthew Nowery leads Samaritan's Purse in northern Iraq and he says this is the perfect time for revival. 

"This is a dangerous calling. But I ask for prayer for the people themselves that are going to be displaced. That God would soften their hearts now. That they would be receptive to the message that so many of Jesus' followers are going to be out here in the desert of Iraq to provide," he told CBN News. 

Many Christians throughout the Middle East are fighting the war against ISIS on their knees and are praying for God to sanctify and restore the land the jihadis have defiled. 

Friday, Nov. 18, Iraqi Christians are meeting for an event called "Christ Day." That day will be dedicated to praying over the land defiled by ISIS militants. 

Fabian Greche leads a prayer group in northern Iraq and believes God is far from finished with the Middle East. 

"We easily get affected by darkness around us. It affects us, but if we look at Jesus and at His Word we see that God wants to pour out His Spirit. He's coming back for a bride, and He will have one in the Middle East." 

Reprinted with permission from CBN.com. Copyright The Christian Broadcasting Network, Inc., All rights reserved.

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Iraqi Christians Look Homeward Toward Mosul, Uncertainly - WORLD WATCH MONITOR CHARISMA NEWS

A man returns to his village after it was liberated from Islamic State militants, south of Mosul in Qayyara. (REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani)

Iraqi Christians Look Homeward Toward Mosul, Uncertainly

10/24/2016 WORLD WATCH MONITOR  CHARISMA NEWS

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Tens of thousands of Christians fled from Mosul and its surrounding towns and villages to Kurdistan when Islamic State (IS or ISIS) seized swathes of territory in summer 2014.

Several thousand families have sought refuge in Jordan and Lebanon, while others have left the Middle East to start new lives in Western nations such as Canada, Australia and, in a small number of cases, Britain. Levels of Christian emigration began rising in response to the violence that followed the 2003 US-led invasion and removal of President Saddam Hussein.

Rev. Ammar is a Chaldean priest who fled from the town of Qaraqosh—home to some 60,000 Christians until summer 2014, and now being fought over as the coalition of forces advances on Mosul. He serves displaced Moslawis (people from Mosul) in the Kurdish capital, Erbil, and said: "We hope to be able to return to our houses and towns soon."

Rev. Thabet, of the village of Karamles, said he wanted to return to the nearby Hill of St. Barbara, a mound on top of ruins of ancient Assyrian temples—named after a pagan ruler's daughter who converted to Christianity in the fourth century. "If my town is liberated, then one of the greatest joys would be to have a Mass in the open air on top of the Hill of St. Barbara and celebrate the holy Eucharist [there] again."

Rev. Poulos, from the town of Bashiqa, said: "We are warned that IS possibly put mines in our houses. After villages are liberated, it may still take more than three months before we can go back for a first visit. Returning to our houses then would take even longer." He added that all this week heavy fighting has been reported in his home town. "In Bashiqa it's a true war situation, with Turks, Peshmerga and Iraqi forces coming in—a lot of explosions and fighting."

Poulos is in touch with eight Syriac Orthodox monks living in Mar Mattai (St. Matthew), a monastery on a mountainside less than five kilometers from Bashiqa. "I've called them several times and they hear the sound of bombs. From the monastery they can see that a lot of bombing and fighting is going on. Nobody can go there now, but I hope it will be retaken soon."

The battle was not immediately affecting the monastery (which also houses three displaced families). "We have no problems, but we are watching for the future what will happen."

However, other Iraqi Christians who have moved far from home expressed no desire to return—because some of their Muslim neighbors had sympathized with IS. Rev. Aphram Ozan, a Syriac Orthodox priest in London who fled Mosul in 2011 after his family home was attacked by extremists, said: "I don't think Christians will return to Mosul. In the beginning, the people of Mosul welcomed IS. We were let down by the people; they left us."

Rev. Khalil Jaar, a Catholic priest in the Jordanian capital, Amman, and a partner of World Vision, said "not one" of the 500 or so Moslawi refugee families for whom he is co-ordinating aid was considering returning to the area. He said if adequate protection were offered, some had said they might return briefly to sell their houses, but would then go to their new homes. "ISIS is finished but the mentality and spirit of ISIS lives on in the heart of so many people in Mosul," he said.

One Christian former resident of Mosul in his early 30s recalled that increasing levels of extremism had strained his friendships with Muslims, even before 2003. "Growing up, I had friends who were Muslim. We played together and ate together and their parents treated us as though we were their children. But when some of them got to about 16 or 17, something changed. Maybe they had learnt something from the Quran or from the mosque—they changed and became more extreme, which made a gap between us. They became more extreme than their parents."

Suha Rassam, a Chaldean Catholic from Mosul and author of Christianity in Iraq, said that among her Iraqi Christian friends and relatives, "everybody is excited that Mosul is being liberated." But she added: "Although there are no more Christians in Mosul, I am still concerned about the Muslim population there, that they may not suffer too much and there is no slaughtering of the Sunni." However, she expressed concern that the presence of Kurdish and Turkish forces in the Nineveh Plains around Mosul could lead to both powers making territorial claims there. Extremism took hold in Mosul partly as a reaction against Kurdish expansionism, she said. "Even once Mosul is liberated, we can still expect a lot of trouble. It's not good for the unity of Iraq," she said.  

Christians and others suspect that the aim of the Kurdistan Regional Government is to earn political capital. Some voiced fears that because some Iraqi qualifications are not recognized there and government jobs require Kurdish-speakers, Arab Christians impoverished by their displacement could find themselves subjected to a "Kurdification" process.

One Christian former resident of Mosul whose family fled to Kurdistan said: "For all of history, the Kurds have been killing us, until now. They're trying to put on a good face; they want to liberate themselves from Iraq and show they are better than Iraq. But there's no future for Christianity in Kurdistan: my parents don't speak Kurdish, and because my nephews aren't Kurdish they aren't allowed to go to state school there."

But Poulos said he already knows what he will do if it's ever possible to go back to Bashiqa: "The first thing I will do is go to the church. If the church is not damaged and I can go in, I will pray. After that we will check how much damage is done to the church and to the houses. What needs to be done, what needs rebuilding?" 

This article originally appeared on World Watch Monitor.

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Obama Throws Christian Refugees to Lions

  (Photo added by Love For His People editor.)

Obama Throws Christian Refugees to Lions

By Raymond Ibrahim  Breaking Israel News  Oct. 3, 2015

Why are Christian minorities, who are the most to suffer from the chaos engulfing the Middle East, the least wanted in the United States?

To the Obama administration, the only “real” refugees are those made so due to the actions of Bashar Assad. As for those who are being raped, slaughtered, and enslaved based on their religious identity by so-called “rebel” forces fighting Assad — including the Islamic State — their status as refugees is evidently considered dubious at best.

The Obama administration never seems to miss an opportunity to display its bias for Muslims against Christians. The State Dept. is in the habit of inviting scores of Muslim representatives but denying visas to solitary Christian representatives. While habitually ignoring the slaughter of Christians at hands of Boko Haram, the administration called for the “human rights” of the jihadi murderers.

In Islamic usage, the “cause of Allah” is synonymous with jihad to empower and enforce Allah’s laws on earth, or Sharia. In this context, immigrating into Western lands is a win-win for Muslims: if they die in the process somehow, paradise is theirs; if they do not, the “locations and abundance” of the West are theirs.

Muslims all around the U.S. are supporting the Islamic State and Muslim clerics are relying on the refugee influx to conquer Western nations, in the Islamic tradition of Hijrah, or jihad by emigration.

The fate of those Iraqi Christians who had fled from the Islamic State only to be incarcerated in the United States has finally been decided by the Obama administration: they are to be thrown back to the lions, where they will likely be persecuted, if not slaughtered, like so many Iraqi Christians before them.

Fifteen of the 27 Iraqi Christians that have been held at a detention center in Otay Mesa, California, for approximately six months, are set to be deported in the coming weeks. Some have already been deported and others are being charged with immigration fraud.

Many of the Iraqi Christian community in San Diego — including U.S. citizen family members vouching for the refugees — had hopes that they would eventually be released. Mark Arabo, a spokesman for the Chaldean community, had argued that “They’ve escaped hell. Let’s allow them to reunite with their families.” One of the detained women had begged to see her ailing mother before she died. The mother died before they could reunite, and now the daughter is to be deported, possibly back to the hell of the Islamic State.

Members of California’s Iraqi Christian community and their supporters protest the months-long detention of Iraqi Christian asylum-seekers at the Otay Mesa detention center. (Image source Al Jazeera video screenshot)

Why are Christian minorities, who are the most to suffer from the chaos engulfing the Middle East, the least wanted in the United States?

The answer is that the Obama administration defines refugees as people “persecuted by their government.” In other words, the only “real” refugees are those made so due to the actions of Syrian President Bashar Assad. As for those who are being raped, slaughtered, and enslaved based on their religious identity by so-called “rebel” forces fighting Assad — including the Islamic State — their status as refugees is evidently considered dubious at best.

As Abraham H. Miller argues in “No room in America for Christian refugees“:

“What difference does it make which army imperils the lives of innocent Christians? Christians are still be[ing] slaughtered for being Christian, and their government is incapable of protecting them. Does some group have to come along — as Jewish groups did during the Holocaust — and sardonically guarantee that these are real human beings?”

In fact, from the start of Western meddling in the Middle East in the context of the “Arab Spring,” Christians were demonized for being supportive of secular strongmen like Assad. In a June 4, 2012 article discussing the turmoil in Egypt and Syria, the Independent’s Robert Fisk scoffed at how Egyptian presidential candidate “Ahmed Shafiq, the Mubarak loyalist, has the support of the Christian Copts, and Assad has the support of the Syrian Christians. The Christians support the dictators. Not much of a line, is it?”

More than three years later, the Western-supported “Arab Spring” proved an abysmal failure and the same Christian minorities that Fisk took to task were, as expected, persecuted in ways unprecedented in the modern era.

The Obama administration never seems to miss an opportunity to display its bias for Muslims against Christians. The U.S. State Dept. is in the habit of inviting scores of Muslim representatives but denying visas to solitary Christian representatives. While habitually ignoring the slaughter of Christians at hands of Boko Haram, the administration called for the “human rights” of the jihadi murderers. And when persecuted Egyptian Copts planned on joining the anti-Muslim Brotherhood revolution, Obama said no. Then there is the situation that every Arab nation the Obama administration has meddled in — for example, Libya and Syria — has seen a dramatic nosedive in the human rights of Christian minorities.

The Obama administration’s bias is evident even regarding the Iraqi Christians’ illegal crossing of the U.S.-Mexico border, the occasion on which they were arrested. WND correctly observes: “At the same time the Obama administration [is] deporting Christians, it has over the years allowed in hundreds of Muslim migrants from Africa and the Middle East who crossed the Southern border the same way the Chaldeans did.”

Meanwhile, as the Obama administration nitpicks at the definition of refugee and uses it against severely persecuted Christian minorities, it turns out that four out of five migrants — or 80 percent — are not even from Syria.

And while Christian minorities pose little threat to the United States — indeed, they actually bring benefits to U.S. security — Muslims all around the U.S. are supporting the Islamic State and Muslim clerics are relying on the refugee influx to conquer Western nations, in the Islamic tradition of Hijrah, or jihad by emigration. As Koran 4:100 puts it:

And whoever emigrates for the cause of Allah will find on the earth many locations and abundance. And whoever leaves his home as an emigrant to Allah and His Messenger and then death overtakes him — his reward has already become incumbent upon Allah.

In Islamic usage, the “cause of Allah” is synonymous with jihad to empower and enforce Allah’s laws on earth, or Sharia. In this context, immigrating into Western lands is a win-win for Muslims: if they die in the process somehow, paradise is theirs; if they do not, the “locations and abundance” of the West are theirs.

All the while, the Obama administration is turning away Christian refugees fleeing the same hostile Muslim forces as Muslims — who are being welcomed into America and Europe.

Read more at http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/49757/obama-throws-christian-refugees-to-lions-opinion/#i81Lz1l06xrAO3iz.99

Holocaust Survivor Saved by Christians Returns the Favor

Thursday, July 16, 2015 |  Israel Today Staff

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At the age of 19, Arthur George Weidenfeld was among the many Jews whom British Christians successfully rescued from Nazi-controlled Austria just as Adolf Hitler and his cohorts were putting the “Final Solution” into action.

Seventy-seven years later, now a British lord, Weidenfeld is looking to return the favor by rescuing Syrian and Iraqi Christians under mortal threat from the advancing Islamist horde known as ISIS.

Weidenfeld was brought to England in 1938 by the Quakers and the Plymouth Brethren. Not long after, he started the publishing business of Weidenfeld and Nicolson. In 1976, his overwhelming success and unrestrained philanthropy landed Weidenfeld the title of Lord, Baron Weidenfeld, to be exact.

This week, Weidenfeld told London’s The Times that he “has a debt to repay,” and has established the Weidenfeld Safe Havens Fund to transport and financially support Middle East Christians facing forced conversion and death.

According to reports, the Fund has already flown 150 Syrian Christians to Poland, where it will support them financially for the next 12–18 months while they get on their feet and integrate with their new country.

The initial goal is to get as many as 2,000 Christians out of Syria in the coming months.

Much like with the Nazi Holocaust, the nations of the world are doing very little to assist and save the beleaguered Christians of the Middle East, leaving individuals and smaller organizations to tackle this impossible task.

Weidenfeld acknowledged that he can’t save everyone, but feels there is significance in a Jewish Holocaust survivor reaching out a helping hand to Christians in the greatest of need.

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