By Dan Wooding, Founder of the ASSIST News Service
SYRIA (ANS – October 9, 2015)
-- A video released by the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) on
October 7, 2015, has showed the jihadists killing three Assyrian
Christian hostages with shots to the back of their heads.
According to the Assyrian Monitor for Human Rights, it is the first IS video showing Christians in Syria being executed.
“Shown in orange jumpsuits at a
desert location, the three Assyrians knelt in front of their killers
who were wearing wide-flowing fatigues and black masks,” said a story
from World Watch Monitor (WWM) -- www.worldwatchmonitor.org
The murdered Christians were
among the 253 villagers abducted seven months ago in north-eastern
Syria’s Hassaka province, where IS jihadists overran 35 Assyrian
villages along the Khabur river on February 23, 2015. The three men were
named as Dr. Audisho Enwiya and Ashur Abraham, both from the village of
Tel Jazira, and Basam Michael from Tel Shamiram, the Assyrian
International News Agency (AINA) said.
Quoting its own sources, the
Assyrian Human Rights Network (AHRN) dated the murders to September 23,
2015, the morning of this year’s annual Eid al-Adha (the Muslim Feast of
Sacrifice).
“The
new video showed three more identified Assyrian victims, who stressed
that their fate would be the same as the three just shot dead in front
of them, if the militants’ demands were not met,” said World Watch
Monitor.
Zaya, 27, William, 51, and
Marden, 49, first called themselves “Nasrani” [Nazarites, a pejorative
Muslim term for Christians], and then stated their full names and home
villages.
WWM went on to say that part of
the video was aired by privately-owned Lebanese OTV, affiliated to the
Free Patriotic Movement headed by veteran politician General Michel
Aoun, a Maronite Christian more recently in political alliance with
Hezbollah. IS demanded $50,000 each in ransom for the remaining
Assyrians, now believed to number between 187 and 200. A total of 48
mostly elderly Khabur hostages have been released sporadically since the
initial 23 Feb. abductions.
Syrian Catholic Archbishop
Jacques Behnan Hindo of Hassaka had told Fides News Agency on September
8, 2015, that the kidnappers, contacted through intermediary
negotiators, were “asking for much, much less” money to release the
Khabur Christians after initial demands of $100,000 each.
In a press statement released
just after the Assyrians’ execution video appeared, the European Syriac
Union declared, “The ongoing conflict in the Middle East … is causing
irrevocable damage to the native people, minorities, ethnic and
religious groups” of Iraq and Syria. “From the beginning of the fall of
Mosul city until today, Chaldean-Syriac-Assyrian people and Ezidis
[Yazidis] have been subject to killings, executions, ransom and
mass-displacement.”
When
IS captured the town of Qaryatain in the western Syrian province of
Homs in early August, the jihadis snatched Assyrian hostages from at
least 100 families. Fifteen of those were subsequently released, while
the militant group announced a month later that they had imposed the
punitive jizya Islamic tax on the Christians still living in Qaryatain.
The fate of Syrian Catholic Fr.
Jacques Mourad, who was abducted from St. Elian Monastery near
Qaryatain in May, remains uncertain, although pictures of him in
captivity were shown on a number of Lebanese television stations in
August.
Photo captions: 1) Islamic
State killers take over another Syrian town. 2) Another brutal murder by
IS. 3) Kidnapped Syrian Catholic priest Fr. Jacques Mourad 4) Dan
Wooding reporting for ANS from outside the Kurdistan Parliament in
Erbil, Northern Iraq.
About
the writer: Dan Wooding, 74, is an award-winning author, broadcaster
and journalist who was born in Nigeria of British missionary parents,
and is now living in Southern California with his wife Norma, to whom he
has been married for more than 52 years. They have two sons, Andrew and
Peter, and six grandchildren who all live in the UK. Dan is the founder
and international director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in
Strategic Times) and the ASSIST News Service (ANS). He is also the
author of some 45 books and has reported widely from the Middle East for
ANS, including from Iraq.
** You may republish this or any of ANS stories with attribution to the ASSIST News Service (www.assistnews.net)
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