Free Republic

In the wake of yet another foiled ISIS-inspired terrorist plot, this one by a Canada-based Pakistani seeking to kill Jews in New York on the anniversary of last year’s Hamas attack in Israel, everyone is loudly proclaiming: “ISIS is back.”And yet, this analysis is wrong.For someone or something to “be back,” it has to have left in the first place. This return can be surprising or expected, but in the end it is of note. With respect to the ISIS terrorist group, it has not “resurged” because it never went away in the first place.The group has been around since...

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Islamist ambitions seem to be seeking an international role in post-U.S. Afghanistan in alliance with the Taliban, Qatar, Pakistan and Malaysia. The trouble is, Turkey, among the new sharia alliance in the making, is the only country with institutional ties to the Western world. Biden has weakened himself and his country so badly that the superpower was reduced to the point of being blackmailed by NATO's only Islamist member. Turkey's Defense Minister Hulusi Akar has made it clear: "If the U.S. is to be in the Middle East, it must cooperate with Turkey." Afghanistan is...

A German-Tunisian Islamic State widow has been sentenced to just four years in prison after being convicted of enslaving two Yazidi women while living in the former caliphate. Omaima A., 37, had moved to Islamic State-controlled territory in Syria in 2014 and married terrorist rapper Denis Cuspert, also known as “Deso Dogg”. The pair enslaved two Yazidi women who had previously been abducted by the terror group.On Thursday, the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court convicted the jihadi bride of aiding and abetting a crime against humanity in the form of enslavement under the International Criminal Code, Bild reports. The Islamic State...

...Lost in the turbulent tangles of the news is another one of Turkey’s victims, a population of Christians who are a distinct ethnic group that has been historically targeted by the Ottoman Empire. The Assyrians were slaughtered alongside the Greeks and Armenians in the genocide of 1915 and then again in 1933 during the Simele Massacre, at the hands of Arab-Iraqi nationalists. Their persecution continued throughout the century, foisting upon them a life of transience and displacement. Today, the diaspora population is larger than the population of Assyrians in their homeland, which is parts of northern Iraq, Syria, Turkey and...

The U.S. withdrawal from Syria puts Yazidis, Christians and other religious minorities in danger, writes @pir_hadi https://t.co/MJQXYSNV0d— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) October 18, 2019 Trump’s Syria Exit Puts Yazidis in PerilISIS will re-emerge as soon as the pressure lets up.wsj.com

Trump steps in to save Christians and Yazidis from extinction by jihadists JUL 19, 2019 3:37 PM BY CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS To acknowledge the levels of Christian persecution and Yazidis means to acknowledge a major problem within Islamic countries which are governed by the sharia; therefore, Christians have been left virtually ignored. That is, until Donald Trump decided to step in. “U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is helping bring Christians and Yazidis in Iraq back from the brink of extinction fomented by a genocidal campaign at the hands of the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL), religious minority representatives declared this week at the...

A group of Yazidis who held a demonstration outside the White House on March 15 called on the Trump administration to locate or rescue the estimated 3,000 women and children captured, held or killed by ISIS terrorists. The protestors pointed to the recent incident in which ISIS fighters, fleeing one of their last strongholds in eastern Syria, beheaded of 50 Yazidi women who had been as sex slaves by the ISIS terrorists. Most participants at the rally were survivors of ISIS's 2014 genocidal attacks on Yazidis, a persecuted non-Muslim minority indigenous to Iraq, Syria and Turkey. According to a 2017...

By Jeff Gardner -Last August, Joseph received the news he had feared for weeks: The armies of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, had invaded the region of Sinjar in western Iraq, the place where he and tens of thousands of Yezidis had lived for centuries. When Joseph got word that ISIS fighters were headed towards his home village of Tillqasab, he panicked — although he had left years ago, his elderly father still lived in the village. Arriving at the outskirts of town, Joseph realized that he was too late — Tillqasab had already fallen...

In May of 2016, Navy Seal Charlie Keating was embedded with Kurdish Peshmerga forces in an area of Northern Iraq known as the Nineveh Plain.  Christians, Yazidis, and the Shabak sect of Shia Islam all call the area home, forming a unique cultural mosaic, a centuries-old tapestry of religious diversity. ISIS targeted these communities for genocidal extermination. In a battle to regain control of the ancient Christian village of Teleskof, Charlie and his team were ambushed by ISIS. Charlie fell to a sniper’s bullet.At this point, America has given so much, lost so much in Iraq, it’s hard to understand...

A senior official at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) allegedly granted asylum to more than 1,200 applicants without valid legal reasons for their approval. She has since been removed from her position. The employee headed the BAMF office in Bremen and worked with three lawyers who assisted her in wrongfully granting asylum to refugees from other federal states, according to joint research conducted by Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), NDR and Radio Bremen. Many of the applicants were said to have been Yazidis, a Kurdish religious minority living mainly in northern Iraq and northern Syria. During the reign of...

"Erdoğan has cynically referred to these students as 'terrorists,' vowed to expel them from Boğaziçi University, and to deny them the right to study at any other university. We have heard this kind of verbal attack from Erdoğan before and it was followed by the detention of thousands of academics, journalists, artists, and human rights advocates." Ankara does nothing to prevent ISIS from selling Yazidi women and children in Turkey; allows unspecified numbers of people to use Turkish territory as a point of entrance into Syria and Iraq to join ISIS or other jihadist groups; hosts and aids Hamas,...

Yazidis, a historically persecuted non-Muslim people in the Middle East, are yet again fleeing for their lives — this time from Turkey-backed jihadists invading Afrin in northern Syria. Murad Ismael, executive director of Yazda, a relief organization for Yazidi victims of genocide, has alerted the world to the deadly threat posed by Turkish airstrikes many times on his social media accounts and on March 12 wrote on Twitter: "We are evaluating what to do when the [whole] city falls, including an option to ask our people to leave the region altogether. We cannot have our people in Afrin under Al...

Vice President Mike Pence announced Wednesday night that President Trump has ordered the State Department to shut off funding for “ineffective” United Nations programs to help persecuted Christians in the Middle East, saying the administration will take over those efforts directly. “From this day forward, America will provide support directly to persecuted communities through USAID,” Mr. Pence said at the In Defense of Christians annual solidarity dinner in Washington. “We will no longer rely on the United Nations alone to assist persecuted Christians and minorities in the wake of genocide and the atrocities of terrorist groups.” Saying Christians have been...

President Trump has issued a White House directive forcing the State Department and USAID to bypass the United Nations and stop its "ineffective" relief efforts aimed at helping Iraqi Christians, Yazidis, and other persecuted religious minorities, and instead to provide the assistance either directly or through "faith-based groups."Vice President Mike Pence, in a speech at the In Defense of Christians annual Solidarity Dinner highlighting the plight of persecuted Christians in the Middle East and elsewhere, announced the directive and lambasted the United Nations, arguing the international body has "often failed to help the most vulnerable communities, especially religious minorities.""We will...

Iraqi Christian genocide survivors may forever vanish from their ancient homelands. They were in crisis when I met with them a few days before Christmas last year in Erbil, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Now their survival is endangered and two things must be done to secure it. The Senate should quickly bring up and pass the House-passed, bipartisan H.R. 390 (Iraq and Syria Genocide Emergency Relief and Accountability Act)—which I authored with my colleague, Rep. Ann Eshoo (CA-18). H.R. 390 authorizes the Administration to direct humanitarian and recovery assistance to all religious and ethnic minority communities ISIS targeted...

Full title: State Department lawyers removing references to ISIS 'genocide' against Christians, other religious minorities The State Department's top lawyers are systematically removing the word "genocide" to describe the Islamic State's mass slaughter of Christians, Yazidis, and other ethnic minorities in Iraq and Syria from speeches before they are delivered and other official documents, according to human rights activists and attorneys familiar with the policies. Additionally, Democratic senators are delaying confirmation of Mark Green, Trump's pick to head the U.S. Agency for International Development who has broad bipartisan support. These efforts guarantee that Obama-era policies that worked to exclude Iraq's...

The militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorist group have reportedly burnt at least nineteen Yazidi girls to death after they refused to remain as sex slaves with the terror group, it has been reported According to the local activists, the incident has taken place during the recent days in the city of Mosul in Iraq. Abdullah Al-Malla, a local media activist, has told the Kurdish news agency ARA News, that the girls were burnt alive after they refused to have sex with the fighters of the group. “They were punished for refusing to have sex...

As the Islamic State continues its genocide against Christians, Yazidis, and other religious minorities in Syria and Iraq, human rights activist and lawyer Jacqueline Isaac testified at the United Nations about some of the atrocities, including parents in Syria who were shown a video of their kidnapped daughters being raped and tortured by ISIS, and then given the dismembered body parts of their daughters in plastic bags. Although Isaac, vice president of the humanitarian group Roads of Success, testified on April 28, her remarks – at the United Nations in New York City -- about the atrocities against women captured...

(CNSNews.com) -- During debate in the British House of Commons about the genocidal actions of the Islamic State (or Daesh), two Ministers of Parliament (MPs) recounted the testimony of a Yazidi girl who was kidnapped and raped, whose father and brother were killed in front of her, who witnessed a 9-year-old girl being raped to death, and who saw a 2-year-old boy killed, ground into meat, and then “fed to his mother who did not know what she was eating.”

The Islamic State (ISIS) jihadist group burned 19 Yazidi girls alive after they refused to have sex with its fighters, according to reports. The girls were locked in cages before being publicly executed in the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, according to the Kurdish ARA news agency. The gruesome spectacle took place in front of hundreds of people, according to local media activist Abdullah al-Malla. "They were punished for refusing to have sex with ISIS militants," he told ARA. Mosul is ISIS's de-facto capital in Iraq, and the country's second largest city. ISIS views the Yazidis - members of...