Forces Rally to Defend Christian Town From Islamic State
Earlier this year, on Feb. 23, jihadis drove out 3,000 Assyrian Christians from their homes when they overran 35 of their villages on the Khabour River in Hassaka, at the opposite end of the country in north-eastern Syria.
An estimated 168 Christians are still captives of the IS, after the jihadis, on camera, shot three dead and threatened to kill more if demands for a hefty ransom were not met.
The Last Stronghold in Iraq
Further east, across the border in Iraq, IS militants drove into the Nineveh Plains in August 2014, north and east of Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul, sending 200,000 indigenous Assyrians on the run.
The date was Aug. 7.
“Aug. 7 is Assyrian Martyrs’ Day. It is commemorated worldwide by Assyrians to remember their fallen, including the 3,000 who were killed by the Iraqi army in Iraq between Aug. 7 and 11, 1933,” said Peter BetBasoo, founder of the Assyrian International News Agency.
The Nineveh Plains were the last stronghold of Assyrians in Iraq.
Having escaped 1,400 years of persecution “by Muslims, Arabs, Turks, Kurds and Iranians, the events of the past year have caused a fundamental psychological transformation of most of the Assyrian population,” BetBasso said.
“The low-grade genocide since 2004 and the wanton destruction by ISIS in the last year in Iraq and Syria have caused most Assyrians to see the writing on the wall, and to acknowledge, consciously and subconsciously, that it is time to leave their birth land.”
The jihadis, including IS militants, have invariably left a trail of destruction behind them, including destroyed ancient churches, monasteries and shattered native communities.
It is this “wanton” treatment of Christian minorities elsewhere in the Middle East that is motivating Christian fighters to prevent another tragedy in Sadad, said Nuri Kino, founder of the Middle Eastern advocacy group A Demand for Action.
“We hope that Sadad does not become a new Mosul, Nineveh, Khabour or al-Qaryatain,” Kino told Newsweek. “The people in Sadad and all those that joined them, many Christians from all over Syria, showed that they have had it with ISIS turning Christians into slaves.”
(Note: Kino has been a contributor to World Watch Monitor).
Sadad is a center of heritage for Syria’s Christian minority, which made up approximately 10 percent of the country’s pre-war population. It is home to several churches, including the Syriac Orthodox Church of St. Theodore and the Church of Mar Sarkis, which holds a number of rare 18th-century Christian wall paintings.
The Syriac Orthodox Church traditionally has had between 1.5 million and 2 million followers spread throughout Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and southern Turkey. Yet, like other native Middle Eastern communities, more are increasingly living in a Western diaspora than remaining in their now-hostile cradle lands.
This year marks a century since what has become known among Assyrians/Syriacs as the Sayf, or Sword—the mass killings of their populations by Ottomans during World War I—in conjunction with the Armenian and Greek genocides.
Speaking of Sadad, Rev. Awad said, “It is in every sense a center of Christian heritage whose loss is unthinkable!”
“We plead with the international community to put an end to this war. Our people have been the victim of a genocide 100 years ago in 1915,” he said. “We do not need another genocide in the 21st century.”
