ISIS Forces Assyrian Christian Woman to Trample Jesus Christ's Image at Gunpoint

A Syrian refugee woman crosses into Turkey with her children at the Akcakale border gate in Sanliurfa province, Turkey, June 15, 2015. On Sunday, Turkish authorities reopened the border after a few days of closure, a security source said, adding that they expected as many as 10,000 people to come across.

An Assyrian Christian woman who was kidnapped but recently released by the Islamic State terror group has revealed the jihadists stormed her home and forced her to trample on an image of Jesus Christ at gunpoint.

"They stormed in the door, their faces not covered. They put a gun to my chest and threw an image of Christ hanging on the wall on the floor. They asked me to step on it. I had no choice. My daughters and grandchildren were there. They took all of us to the river," the woman, whos name wasn't shared, told Al-Monitor in an interview posted on Thursday.

The woman was one of 253 Assyrians kidnapped by IS in a raid on 35 different villages along the Khabur River back in February.

Though the militants have released some of the captives, they are still holding over 200 Christians in bondage, and are demanding $100,000 each for their release.

The woman said that the rest of her family is still in the IS-held city of Shaddadeh, though she doesn't know what has happened to them.

She explained that IS took 85 people from her village of Tel Tamer alone, and that she saw her house burned down. The Assyrians were then thrown on a boat as they crossed the river, and then put on trucks to Shaddadeh.

"The first thing they did was to separate the men from the women. Children younger than 11 would stay with the women. From that moment on, we never saw the men and boys again. We were allowed, however, to send letters over to the men and receive theirs," she continued.

"They crammed all of us into a room with a single window. There was so little room we would take turns lying down to sleep. We would take turns by the window to breathe better."

She revealed that although she suffered great psychological fear while in captivity along with the other women and girls, they were not beaten or tortured, and escaped some of the horrific tales other captives have shared of their time in bondage.

"I don't know why we were not beaten or worse, but I can tell you that for the entire time we lived in extreme fear. We were constantly threatened verbally," she said.

"They would say to us, 'We know everything about you. You speak and you are dead.' In our group no one accepted IS 'offer' to convert to be freed. But we knew that those who put up physical resistance from other villages were killed."

Western governments have been accused of not doing enough to help the Assyrian Christians, along with the other minorities being persecuted by IS across Iraq and Syria.

Nuri Kino, a worker with the A Demand for Action group, said back in June that Christians are massively being driven out of Syria, much like they are from Iraq.

"There is a gradual ethno-religious cleansing in the Middle East. It started in Iraq and has now come to Syria and we do not know when it will happen in other countries. There is an ongoing genocide in these countries," Kino said.

Jean-Clément Jeanbart, the Melkite Greek Catholic Archbishop of Aleppo, Syria, has also said that Christians are slowly dying in the war-torn country.

"What horrors must IS commit before the world will take greater action to stop the murderers?" Jeanbart asked in June. "Syrian Christians are in grave danger; we may disappear soon."

Meanwhile, in the Objective Room, something like a crisis had developed. As soon as they arrived there Mark saw that the table had been drawn back. On the floor lay a crucifix, almost life-size, a work in the Spanish tradition, ghastly and realistic. "We have half an hour to pursue our exercises," said Frost. Then he instructed Mark to trample on it and insult it in other ways.

Now, whereas Jane had abandoned Christianity in early childhood, along with fairies and Santa Claus, Mark had never believed it at all. At this moment, therefore, it crossed his mind for the first time that there might conceivably be something in it. Frost, who was watching him carefully, knew perfectly well that this might be the result of the present experiment. But he had no choice. Whether he wished it or not, this sort of thing was part of the initiation.

"But, look here," said Mark.

"What is it?" said Frost. "Pray be quick."

"This," said Mark, " this is all surely a pure superstition."

"Well?"

"Well, if so, what is there objective about stamping on the face? Isn't it just as subjective to spit on a thing like this as to worship it?"

"That is superficial. If you had been brought up in a non-Christian society, you would not be asked to do this. Of course it is a superstition: but it is that particular superstition which has pressed upon our society for many centuries. It can be experimentally shown that it still forms a dominant system in the subconscious of many whose conscious thought appears to be wholly liberated. An explicit action in the reverse direction is therefore a necessary step towards complete objectivity. We find in practice that it cannot be dispensed with."

Mark was surprised at the emotions he was undergoing. He did not regard the image with anything like a religious feeling. Most emphatically it did not belong to that idea of the Straight or Normal which had, for the last few days, been his support. The horrible vigour of its realism was, indeed, as remote from that Idea as anything else in the room. That was one source of his reluctance. To insult even a carved image of such agony seemed abominable. But it was not the only source. With the introduction of this Christian symbol the whole situation had altered, and become incalculable. His simple antithesis of the Normal and the Diseased had obviously failed to take something into account. Why was the crucifix there? Why were more than half the poison-pictures religious?"Pray make haste," said Frost. He was on the verge of obeying and getting the whole silly business over, when the defencelessness of the figure deterred him. Not because its hands were nailed and helpless, but because they were only made of wood and therefore even more helpless, because the thing, for all its realism, was inanimate and could not in any way hit back, he paused. The unretaliating face of a doll-one of Myrtle's dolls-which he had pulled to pieces in boyhood had affected him in the same way.

"What are you waiting for, Mr. Studdock?" said Frost. Mark was aware of rising danger. Obviously, if he disobeyed, his last chance of getting out of Belbury alive might be gone. Even of getting out of this room. He was himself, he felt, as helpless as the wooden Christ. As he thought this, he found himself looking at the crucifix in a new way -neither as a piece of wood nor a monument of superstition but as a bit of history. Christianity was nonsense, but one did not doubt that the man had lived and had been executed thus by the Belbury of those days. And that, as he suddenly saw, explained why this image, though not itself an image of the Straight or Normal, was yet in opposition to crooked Belbury. It was a picture of what happened when the Crooked met the Straight-what would happen to him if he remained straight. It was, in a more emphatic sense than he had understood, a cross.

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