Free Republic

Threatened days before car crash for her reporting on ISIS. The death of an American journalist who worked in the Middle East has come under suspicion because she had claimed days before her death that the Turkish intelligence services had threatened her over her coverage of the siege of the Syrian city of Kobani. Serena Shim, an American citizen of Lebanese origin, was a journalist for Iran’s state-owned Press TV. She was killed in a car crash in the city of Suruc after she reportedly collided with a “heavy vehicle.” She was in a rental car returning from her assignment...

The purge of Christians from northern Iraq continues under the hands of the Sunni jihadist group, the Islamic State--formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). ISIS militants seized the famous Mar Behnam or St. Behnam monastery this week, a fourth century Christian landmark, and forced monks to leave immediately. According to the Agence France-Presse, the monastery, a famous landmark of early Christianity, is now fully in the hands of ISIS jihadists ... The monastery itself is one of the oldest monuments in the history of Christianity