Free Republic

If President Trump recognizes the Armenian genocide by specifically using the word “genocide” in his April 24 proclamation, he would send a strong signal to the world that America is unequivocally on the side of historical truth and the protection of innocent life. He would be only the second president, after Ronald Reagan, to do so boldly and officially. Every year on April 24 there are memorial services, marches, and media reminders of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. The beginning of the massacres is marked on that date in 1915, when hundreds...

The new school year has started this month in Turkey, but Assyrian Christians, otherwise known as Syriacs or Chaldeans, still do not have a single primary school in the country where they could learn their native language and culture. The Istanbul-based newspaper Agos reported that the activists of the Syriac community applied to the Ministry of National Education in 2012 to get its permission and support to open a Syriac kindergarten in Istanbul. When their application was rejected, they took on a legal struggle and were finally able to open the Mor Efrem kindergarten without any economic support from the...

Assyrian Christians living in Sweden have been targeted with a string of threatening messages linked to the Islamic State, including demands that they “convert or die.” A recent report by Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter revealed that the Assyrian community in the city of Gothenburg, in southwestern Sweden, is being menaced by unidentified aggressors using known Islamic State methods and symbols. Local police are investigating the threats, but so far have found nothing. The town of Gothenburg is a hotbed for jihadist recruiting, and the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet earlier this year reported that at least 150 people had left the...

The Islamic State terror group claims it will be executing 180 Assyrian Christians who were kidnapped in mass raids in February, after negotiators failed to meet the jihadists' high asking price to free the hostages.ARA News reported on Monday that the terror group is asking for $12 million for the release of the Assyrians, a sum deemed "unbearable" for the community."The negotiations, led by Bishop Ephrem Otnaial, head of the Church of the East in Syria, have been suspended due to the unbearable demands of the terror group," revealed Osama Edward, director of the Assyrian Human Rights Network."ISIS threatened to...

Assyrian Christians: A Look at the Religious Group Captured by ISIS Mar 1, 2015 BY ALEXANDER MALLIN and PAT O'GARA The world watched in horror last week as reports surfaced that ISIS militants captured as many as 350 Assyrian Christians in northeastern Syria.

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)A documentary filmmaker who spent time with the Free Syrian Army said that moderate rebels are “laughing” at President Obama’s plan to arm them against the Islamic State, claiming they simply “don’t take this seriously.” Matthew VanDyke, an American filmmaker and a friend of executed journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, spoke with Fox News’s Shepard Smith about the White House’s plan to arm and train thousands of rebels affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, a more moderate rebel group that’s friendly with the West, in order to encourage them to fight the Islamic State. VanDyke warned that removing the...

Matthew VanDyke didn't go into Libya to be in the middle of a war. The 31-year-old freelance journalist from Baltimore thought Moammar Gadhafi would be ousted from power by the time he arrived in early March. He would report on the changes sweeping the country and help friends he had met on previous visits build a new country. But VanDyke hasn't been heard from since mid-March, when he called his mother and girlfriend on a cellphone with a scratchy connection while on a truck headed from the rebel stronghold of Benghazi to the town of Brega. (snip) The journalist decided...

Hollie McKay February 27, 2015 Just 12 miles north of the ISIS-controlled city of Mosul, an American filmmaker and self-styled revolutionary is running a boot camp for Christians willing and able to fight for their lives and faith against the murderous Islamic terror organization. Matthew VanDyke, an award-winning documentary filmmaker who escaped a Libyan prison after going there to help overthrow Col. Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, is helping to train hundreds of long-persecuted Assyrian Christians in everything from firearms to close quarters combat. VanDyke, who founded the security contracting firm company Sons of Liberty (SOLI), is working with an unnamed...

Just 12 miles north of the ISIS-controlled city of Mosul, an American filmmaker and self-styled revolutionary is running a boot camp for Christians willing and able to fight for their lives and faith against the murderous Islamic terror organization. Matthew VanDyke, an award-winning documentary filmmaker who escaped a Libyan prison after going there to help overthrow Col. Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, is helping to train hundreds of long-persecuted Assyrian Christians in everything from firearms to close quarters combat. VanDyke, who founded the security contracting firm company Sons of Liberty (SOLI), is working with an unnamed U.S. military veteran to get...

Assyrian Christians in the Nineveh Plain, with the help of a group of Americans, are building a fighting machine to stand toe-to-toe with the Islamic State group to preserve their homeland, their history and their heritage. The Nineveh Plain Protection Unit, or NPU, is a battalion of 350 to 500 men trained by Sons of Liberty International, an American-led nonprofit group aimed at “stepping in where governments in the international community have failed.” SOLI founder Matthew VanDyke of New York, a filmmaker who became a freedom fighter in the Libyan civil war and spent six months as a prisoner of...

The documents kept by the Iraqi Intelligence Service were meticulous in detail and sweeping in scope. In some, Iraqi intelligence officers in the United States are directed to use informers to track the "criminal'' actions of one current and one former Chicago area resident, both Assyrian Christians from Iraq who founded an anti-Saddam Hussein political party. Another accuses the group of being influenced by "imperialists'' and "Zionists.'' Others include the exact dates of the group's meetings and conventions in Chicago and elsewhere, the names of the people who ran the events, those in attendance and what statements were made. Trips...

While Canada's self-appointed guardians of Christmas dig up new evidence of persecution -- a tree moved down the hall, a greeting without "merry" dutifully attached -- real persecution against Christians is going on daily and is being largely ignored. Nowhere is the situation as grave as in Iraq. Since the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq's one million Assyrian Christians -- the oldest sect in Christendom -- have been the target of a campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing at the hands of Islamic extremists and Kurdish nationalists. Tens of thousands have fled the country for Syria, Jordan or Turkey. This...

REBUILDING IN THE GULF Iraqi Christians flee Islamic republic Believers leave country before June 30 designation of state religion -------------------------------------------------------- Posted: June 10, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern Editor's note: WorldNetDaily is pleased to have a content-sharing agreement with Insight magazine, the bold Washington publication not afraid to ruffle establishment feathers. By Ken Joseph Jr. © 2004 Insight/News World Communications Inc. Several developments that bode ill for Christians in Iraq are causing believers to flee the nation. Facing a June 30 deadline for transfer of power, a temporary constitution that reads, in Article 7, that Islam is the "Official Religion of...

IRAQ: ASSYRIANS AND A FEDERATION FOR IRAQ By Elizabeth KendalWorld Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty CommissionSpecial to ASSIST News Service AUSTRALIA  (ANS) -- Fikret Bila reports for the Turkish Press (12 Jan), “Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, the US civilian administrator in Iraq, said that a federation would be the best regime for the country. The Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq are pushing for an ethnic-based federation. They are planning a dual federation based on the Kurds and the Arabs. The ethnic Turkmen and others would not be taken into consideration. Bremer’s approach shows that the US is leaning in the same...

<p>Ambrose Bierce wrote: "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." A quip too true to be entirely funny.</p> <p>The Iraq war has introduced us to the Assyrians, a people whom most Americans probably associate with the Bible and assume must have disappeared millennia ago. Yet there they are, on TV, with one of them, Younadem Kanna, taking a seat on Iraq's new governing council. Their precarious history speaks to the perils of the current moment.</p>

We Hope The Americans Stay Forever! By Ken Joseph, Jr. Baghdad, Iraq It is dusk in Baghdad and I am talking to the regular group of men who gather near the house I am staying in to talk about the days events. "What do you think about the Americans? How long do you think they should stay? Are they doing a good job?" The answer is very complicated while at the same time very, very simple. It is the "politically correct" thing to do to complain about the Americans, say they are not wanted and tell them to "go home"....