Syria: ISIS rapes, tortures, crucifies 12 Christians

From Clarion Project:

ISIS Cuts Off Fingertips of 12-Yr Old Christian Boy 


 He was later crucified with his father. Ten others were killed, including two women, who were raped in front of a crowd before being beheaded. 

Tues October 6, 2015



An Islamic State terrorist reading out a crucifixion sentence in Syria


Reports have emerged about the brutal killing of 12 Christians, including a 12-year-old boy, by the Islamic State in Syria.

The boy was the son of a Syrian ministry team leader who had started nine churches in Syria. The executions took place in village outside of Aleppo.

A spokesperson for Christian Aid said, “In front of the team leader and relatives in the crowd, the Islamic extremists cut off the fingertips of the boy and severely beat him, telling his father they would stop the torture only if he, the father, returned to Islam. When the team leader refused, relatives said, the ISIS militants also tortured and beat him and the two other ministry workers. The three men and the boy then met their deaths in crucifixion."

Eight other aid workers were separately executed for refusing to denounce their faith. In front of a crowd that was summoned to watch, two of the workers, women aged 29 and 33, were raped before all eight were beheaded.

Syria’s Christian’s population has decreased by two-thirds since 2011, when the conflict began. In Iraq, the Christian population, which numbered at close to 1.5 million in 2003 has shrunk to below 200,000 today....

Much more here.

Coming to a neighbourhood near you?

Syria: What about the children?

This is 4 year old Hudea who lives in the Atmeh refugee camp in Syria.  Her picture has gone viral on social media the last few days. The photo was taken by Turkish photographer Osman Sağırlı in 2014.


From the BBC:

The photographer who broke the internet's heart

31 March 2015
Thousands online have shared an image of a Syrian child with her hands raised in surrender - but what is the story behind it?


Those sharing it were moved by the fear in the child's eyes, as she seems to staring into the barrel of a gun. It wasn't a gun, of course, but a camera, and the moment was captured for all to see. But who took the picture and what is the story behind it? BBC Trending have tracked down the original photographer - Osman Sağırlı - and asked him how the image came to be.


It began to go viral Tuesday last week, when it was tweeted by Nadia Abu Shaban, a photojournalist based in Gaza. The image quickly spread across the social network. "I'm actually weeping", "unbelievably sad", and "humanity failed", the comments read. The original post has been retweeted more than 11,000 times. On Friday the image was shared on Reddit, prompting another outpouring of emotion. It's received more than 5,000 upvotes, and 1,600 comments.


Accusations that the photo was fake, or staged, soon followed on both networks. Many on Twitter asked who had taken the photo, and why it had been posted without credit. Abu Shaban confirmed she had not taken the photo herself, but could not explain who had. On Imgur, an image sharing website, one user traced the photograph back to a newspaper clipping, claiming it was real, but taken "around 2012", and that the child was actually a boy. The post also named a Turkish photojournalist, Osman Sağırlı, as the man who took the picture.


BBC Trending spoke to Sağırlı - now working in Tanzania - to confirm the origins of the picture. The child is in fact not a boy, but a four-year-old girl, Hudea. The image was taken at the Atmeh refugee camp in Syria, in December last year. She travelled to the camp - around 10 km from the Turkish border - with her mother and two siblings. It is some 150 km from their home in Hama.


"I was using a telephoto lens, and she thought it was a weapon," says Sağırlı. "İ realised she was terrified after I took it, and looked at the picture, because she bit her lips and raised her hands. Normally kids run away, hide their faces or smile when they see a camera." He says he finds pictures of children in the camps particularly revealing. "You know there are displaced people in the camps. It makes more sense to see what they have suffered not through adults, but through children. It is the children who reflect the feelings with their innocence." [emphasis mine]


The image was first published in the Türkiye newspaper in January, where Sağırlı has worked for 25 years, covering war and natural disasters outside the country. It was widely shared by Turkish speaking social media users at the time. But it took a few months before it went viral in the English-speaking world, finding an audience in the West over the last week.

As Canada's politicians vote on extending their anti-ISIS mission to include bombing over Syria, and Syria's murdering despot Bashir al Assad - who famously ignored Obama's imaginary  red line -  takes time out to do a 'rehabilitative'  interview with 60 Minutes, many MANY girls like Hudea go unknown by the politicians.  Over the last four years hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians (including many Hudeas) have been slaughtered by Assad, and the world has stood on the sidelines wagging their ineffectual stern fingers and making meaningless pronouncements.  

Now, NOW, while the fat cat diplomats and politicians gather to make sweeping public policies,   I can only think about all the little Hudea's whose daily lives continue to be  a hell of terror and survival, if they are 'lucky.'

We, the world community,  should hang our heads in shame.  We should.

Pray for Hudea.  Pray for ALL the Hudea's around the world...


[Related - Yes! It is: The missing girls of Nigeria  ]

Syria: Obama to get out the red crayon - again?:

The MIC of US has continually proved that a) he is out of his depth and  b) is too arrogant to admit he has no friggin clue what he is doing when it comes to foreign policy matters.



His administration continues to assert that hashtag 'diplomacy' will promote peace and harmony around the world - despite daily deadly evidence to the contrary. Three years on, many hundreds of thousands of dead and displaced Syrians have paid the price for Obama's inability/unwillingness to continue America's historical role of standing up for the oppressed and murdered of our world.



As Obama has drawn, re-drawn  and withdrawn 'red lines' matched only by ineffectual words, murdering thugs have killed their fellow countrymen, with impunity, confident that the 'leader of the free world' will do nothing: nothing except give flowery speeches, and wave the now infamous fantasy red crayon around.



Today,  Homeland Security News Wire provides what may be the administration's latest mind waffling related to their current ineffectual (non-existent?) response to the madness that continues in Syria:

U.S. new Syria strategy to seek removal of Assad in parallel with defeat of ISIS
13 November 2014
President Barack Obama’s national security team has been reviewing U.S. policy in Syria after concluding that any meaningful progress in the campaign against ISIS, let alone the defeat of the Islamist organization, may not be achievable without being accompanied by a plan to remove President Bashar al Assad from power. 


The United States began its air attacks on ISIS in early August as part of an “Iraq first” strategy, the thrust of which has been to emphasize the degradation of ISIS military capabilities in Iraq first, while regarding any operations against ISIS in Syria merely as an effort to influence and shape conditions in Iraq. 


The administration was hoping that this approach would give the United States time and space to vet, train, and equip an effective moderate Syrian rebel fighting force to take ISIS on. Administration sources now admit that the initial strategy of trying to confront ISIS first in Iraq and then take it on in Syria, without at the same time also focusing on the removal of the Assad clan from power, was a miscalculation which has backfired.


 The fundamental problem the United States and its Western allies face is that they appear to be willing to use their military might to defend Iran’s allies — the Shi’a regime in Iraq and the Alawite regime in Syria – at the expense of the Sunni majority in Syria and the substantial Sunni minority in Iraq. That perception prompted thousands of Sunni volunteers from around the world to rush to join ISIS ranks, and has led major regional Sunni countries such as Turkey tacitly to support ISIS campaign (the Qatari government, and wealthy individuals in the Gulf States, have been supporting ISIS not so tacitly). Sunnis in the region also note the U.S. apparent acquiescence to three more developments which have enhanced Iran’s sway and influence in the region: the de facto creation of a Shi’a state-within-state in Lebanon under Hezbollah, the takeover last month of Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, by the pro-Iranian Zaydi Shiites from the Houthi clan, and the apparent willingness of the United States to allow Iran to retain a residual nuclear weapons-related capability. 


The cumulative effect of these developments and perceptions has been to cause the regional Arab anti-ISIS coalition to begin to fray, and calls for formulating a realistic strategy to remove Assad from power to grow louder....

There is much more detail here, and it is worth the read.

I suppose it is a good thing that we are told that MIC's ..."national security team has been reviewing U.S. policy in Syria ...".  Better late than never, I guess, even though it is far too late for so many innocent Syrians who will never live to taste freedom.  My only prayer is that after this latest 'review' we see a more intelligent, effective policy than either hashtags or red crayons:  '...a realistic strategy...'



THAT would be change I could believe in.




PAY ATTENTION. 

Victory Girls' take  on the topic.

Syria: About those chemical weapons

Now that Obama put away his red crayon, and the msm has gone on to their next big story du jour,  it would perhaps be easy to forget other issues from months past.  One of those issues?  Syria and their chemical weapons.

From Homeland Security News Wire:

Assad retains secret caches of chemical weapons: Israeli intelligence

1 October 2014


Despite committing to dismantle and give up its chemical weapons – Syria was in possession of the world’s largest chemical weapons stock — President Bashar al-Assad’s regime still maintains a “residual” chemical weapons capacity, consisting of a few tons of the proscribed materials.

Israel’s intelligence community has concluded that the Assad regime has decided to keep this reduced, but still formidable, chemical weapons capability, and has successfully concealed it from the inspectors of the UNchemical weapons watchdog who, a few weeks ago, have declared the chemical disarmament of Syria to be officially complete.

The process of destroying and removing Syria’s chemical weapons began almost a year ago, following international pressure on the Assad regime in the wake of the August 2013 sarin gas attack by Assad forces on a Damascus suburb, an attack which left more than 1,400 dead.

The August 2013 attack was the latest in a series of smaller chemical weapons attacks by Assad’s army on civilians in rebel-held areas, attacks which began in December 2012. Haaretz notes that these early incidents were more or less ignored, and certainly not taken seriously, by the United States and other Western countries. The Israeli intelligence community provided the United States with evidence for a few of these early instances of chemical weapons use – and the head of Israel’s military intelligence referred to these attack in one or two public presentations – but the Obama administration dismissed those claims. President Obama had publicly drawn a “red line” with regard to the use of chemical weapons by Assad, and the administration saw the earlier use of chemical weapons by Assad as too small and localized to trigger a U.S. military retaliation which the president’s red line references promised....

Much more here.

Related:  Video - Obama Warns Syria's Assad Chemical Weapons A 'RED Line'

Heck of a job there, Mr President.

Syria: Al Qaeda Training Western Citizens for Terror Abroad

 
From Israel National News

 by Tova Dvorin 

Al-Qaeda has been using the influx of foreign nationals to Syria to train potential terrorists to begin cells abroad, specifically in the United Kingdom (UK) and European Union (EU), Britain's The Telegraph reported Monday. 

A defector from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) and Western security sources confirmed to the British news agency what UK and other intelligence officials have long suspected: that at least some foreign nationals who leave to fight in the Syrian civil war plan to use their experience and training there to attack their native countries upon their return. 

The defector, speaking from the Turkish border - a route commonly taken by foreign Islamist fighters into Syria - said that Al Qaeda has been training recruits from Europe, the UK and the US how to make and detonate car bombs and suicide vests in anticipation of being sent home to start new terror cells.

“They talked often about terrorist attacks," the defector, who would only give the name of Murad, stated to the British daily. "The foreigners were proud of 9/11 and the London bombings. The British, French and American mujahideen [holy warriors] in the room started talking about places that they wanted to bomb or explode themselves in Europe and the United States. Everyone named a target. The American said he dreamed of blowing up the White House.”

In December, reports surfaced that the UK had revoked the citizenship of several nationals fighting in the Syrian Civil War. The goal, ostensibly, was to prevent its nationals from returning home and bringing fundamentalist Islam with them. 

Syrian Foreign Minister Feisal Mekdad stated to BBC last week that Western officials have reached out to the Syrian regime over the jihadists, in light of the news that hundreds of foreign nationals were involved in terror there. 

And earlier this month, a Lebanese TV channel exposed how British Islamists led by notorious preacher Anjem Choudary were actively recruiting Muslims to fight in Syria.

This report presents the first official confirmation from a Syrian rebel source that Western fighters are being trained to perpetuate terror abroad. The Telegraph estimates that at least 500 British citizens have joined the fighting in the war-torn country - and that the situation is only getting worse. 

The Syrian Civil War has been the ground zero for an all-out holy war between Sunni and Shia Muslims, in the wake of an uprising by the Syrian people against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who identifies with the Alawite sect, which is an offshoot of Shia islam.

Foreign nationals have poured into Syria to fight on both sides of the conflict, raising concerns that the increasingly sectarian conflict could spill over into not only neighboring countries (as has already occurred in Lebanon and Iraq), but even further afield, as Islamist fighters from across the globe receive ideological instruction and battlefield experience which they could potentially take back home with them.

The foreign national problem is not a new one. Canadian, American, and European fighters have made jihad videos from Syria; British Muslims, in particular, have been flocking to the war from all sectors of society. 

Al Qaeda officials have been suspected of reaching out specifically to British university graduates, according a Daily Mail report last month. Some British Muslim women have also been joining the rebel forces, marrying Islamists "in the name of a global Jihad".

   Pay attention.                                                                    

Canada: Convert to Islam killed waging jihad in Syria

I was not going to write about this, but JihadWatch does such a stellar intro to the news, I had to share it.

From Jihad Watch:

This Global News report is headed by a video with this description: "Above: A 22-year-old man who converted to Islam after dealing with depression and attempting suicide, somehow became radicalized and made his way to fight in Syria where he died fighting with an al-Qaeda-linked group." 

So he was depressed, he was suicidal, and then he found his Islam and turned his life -- and went to Syria and got killed waging jihad. Did he convert to Islam and immediately misunderstand it, allowing himself to be "radicalized" by nefarious proselytizing misunderstanders? Yet there is not a single Muslim organization in Canada or anywhere else that is dedicated to keeping converts like Clairmont from falling prey to this understanding of Islam that Muslims in Canada ostensibly reject.

"Calgary man Damian Clairmont reportedly killed fighting in Syria," by Nick Logan for Global News, January 15...

Jihad Watch has more here.

Syria: 'Red line,' what red line?'

 

From Breitbart:

Report: On Anniversary of Obama 'Red Line' Speech, Syria Gasses Hundreds

by Breitbart News 21 Aug 2013

Exactly one year and one day after Barack Obama issued a warning to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad that using chemical weapons would cross a “red line,” opposition forces in Syria have claimed that Assad’s forces launched a nerve gas attack that killed at least 213 people.

Much more (and graphic pictures) here. 

 Homeland Security New Wire has this:

 

Conflicting readings of possible chemical weapons use in Syria

Published 21 August 2013

Rebel sources say the number of dead in a Syrian army chemical weapons attack, which targeted a dozen villages in a rebel-held area east of Damascus, is between 750 and 1,300. They say it is not possible to offer precise numbers because some areas are not yet accessible. The Syrian government strongly rejected the allegations about chemical weapons use by the Syrian army. The Israeli defense minister, in the first official Israeli reaction, confirms the Syrian military used chemical weapons. Chemical weapons experts say there are two other possibilities: the Syrian regime may have used crowd-dispersal chemicals in higher-than-usual concentration, causing death among people trapped in bunkers and shelters; or the army may have used fuel-air bombs in bombing Sunny residential areas. Such bombs, also called thermobaric explosives, rely on oxygen from the surrounding air, unlike most conventional explosives which consist of a fuel-oxidizer premix.


Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Ya’alon, earlier today (Wednesday) offered the first official Israeli reaction to the reports about the use of chemical weapons in Syria earlier in the day.
Rebel sources say the number of dead in the attacks, which targeted a dozen villages in a rebel-held area east of Damascus, is between 750 and 1,300. They say it is not possible to offer precise numbers because some areas are not yet accessible.


The Syrian government strongly rejected the allegations about chemical weapons use by the Syrian army.


Ya’alon said: “The civil war in Syria is continuing, and there are about a 100,000 dead. The regime has also used chemical weapons, and not for the first time.”


Talking with reports, Ya’alon added: “This is a life-and-death struggle between a regime which represents the Alawite community and a fragmented opposition. We don’t see the end [of the struggle], and even the fall of Assad will not bring this conflict to an end.”


Last week, in a meeting with the UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon, who was on a visit to Israel, Ya’alon said that “We should be prepared for a long-term civil war in Syria.” Ya’alon told Ban that Israel’s intelligence and security analysts have concluded that the conflict in Syria has become a global conflict,   [emphasis mine] with one side supported by Russia and the other side backed by the United States....

Much more - with insightful analysis and FACTS, here.


 Out of the White House, it is reported that the administration is 'deeply concerned'.  This from an article (go read) that asks: If Syria's deadly poison gas attack doesn't cross Obama's 'red line,' what does?  

Throughout history, atrocities have been committed and the world turns away.  Obama et al have taken that ignorance to a whole new level. So far, that seems to have worked for him - he is the undisputed master of 'divert and distract,' after all - but as I always comment: If you think that what happens 'over there' has nothing to do with us, you really are not paying attention.  We ARE living in very dangerous times, and if we ignore history, and the echoes of the ages, the implications threaten us ALL.. 

 PAY ATTENTION!


Syria's Darkest Hour