U.S.-Led Alliance Carries Out Airstrikes Against Islamic State
The U.S.-led military coalition battling Islamic State carried out five airstrikes on Thursday in northeastern Syria, a U.S. military spokesman said, hitting an area where the extremist group is believed to hold more than 250 Christians hostage.
Maj. Kim Michelsen didn’t specify why Islamic State positions in the area of Hasakah province were hit, but the attacks came amid calls by local Christian groups for military intervention in support of their communities as the militants increasingly target the region’s religious and ethnic minorities and their ancient heritage.
The Assyrian Human Rights Network said Thursday that 255 Assyrian Christians had gone missing since Monday, when a large Islamic State force entered the province where they were met by Kurdish forces. The coalition has launched 33 airstrikes in support of the Kurds in the past five days, Maj. Michelsen said.
Thirty-five militants have been killed by Kurdish fighters and in Thursday’s airstrikes, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The allegations couldn’t be independently confirmed.
Although Islamist militants in Syria and Iraq have sometimes harassed, uprooted and even killed Christians, such extremist groups have usually heeded the call in Islamic scripture to respect and protect followers of another Abrahamic faith.
But Islamic State’s tolerance for Christians has been in sharp decline in the past month, as it targets their communities in Syria and Iraq, as well as in Libya, where fighters for its affiliate there beheaded 21 Coptic Christians earlier on this month.
Osama Edward, founder of the Stockholm-based Assyrian rights group, on Thursday accused Islamic State of razing two churches and using Christians as human shields. He condemned what he said was the world’s inaction to protect Christians and other minorities in Syria and Iraq from the radical group’s brutality.
“The Assyrians have been killed in front of the entire world and everyone is watching, nobody is taking a stance or action,” Mr. Edward said. “We are just left alone, exposed and the entire world is watching.”
An Islamic State video uploaded to YouTube on Thursday showed its bearded fighters in nearby Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, destroying statues and other artifacts belonging to Assyrian Christians, who represent one of the religion’s oldest communities in the world.
The video, which was released through one of Islamic State’s official media networks showed fighters, many of whom were wearing traditional Pakistani dress, demolishing ancient statues with large mallets, sledgehammers and drills. One sequence showed fighters destroying a statue of a winged Assyrian deity.
“Oh Muslims, these antiquities behind me are idols that were worshiped in the previous ages,” said an unidentified man speaking directly into the camera. “When God ordered us to get rid of these idols and antiquities, his order motivated our mission, and we don’t care if they’re valued at millions of dollars.”
Islamic State’s campaign to destroy what they regard as pagan idols has already appears to have left the Mosul Museum, one of the largest repositories of Assyrian patrimony in the world, in tatters. Its collection included artifacts that were 3,000 years old.
Islamic State fighters are believed to have already burned the contents of the Mosul’s main library, which held thousands of ancient books.
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