(Photo: Reuters/Stringer)
Christian Post Report – A child cries in a military helicopter after being evacuated by Iraqi forces from Amerli, north of Baghdad, Aug. 29, 2014. A home to around 180,000 people, mostly Turkmen Shi’ites, the small town of Amerli is still holding out against repeated attacks by Islamic State fighters despite the fall of all the 34 villages surrounding it.
In the first year of its self-proclaimed Islamic Caliphate, ISIS jihadists executed over 3,027 people, among them being at least 86 women and 76 children, as reported by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Some analysts have suggested that such executions are part of an “apocalypse ideology.”
The report, released earlier this week, looks back at the atrocities the jihadists have committed throughout the past year, since it first invaded Iraq back in June 2014.
The number of executions does not include all people that have died as a result of ISIS’ actions, but only those executed for crimes under the terror group’s authority. Such “crimes” include blasphemy and spying, practicing sorcery, sodomy, or identifying as a Shiite Muslim. The methods of execution have ranged from beheading, stoning, burning individuals alive, drowning them in cages, or throwing them off tall buildings.
SOHR said in another report in June that two boys younger than 18 were crucified in Syria for failing to fast during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, after which their bodies were displayed as a warning in the town of Mayadin, Deir Ezzor province.
“Apparently, they were caught eating,” SOHR founder Rami Abdel Rahman said in an interview.
All such executions are part of an “apocalypse ideology of the final battle between the believers and the unbelievers,” suggested Jasmine Opperman, the director of Southern Africa Operations at the Terrorism, Research & Analysis Consortium, in an article by Fox News.
“ISIS is using executions to show its followers — and would-be followers — that the group is the only true representative of believers, not only in word, but action, which is why executions are featured so prominently.”
ISIS has stepped up its operations throughout Ramadan, carrying out terror activities in several different countries, including three separate attacks on Friday of last week in France, Tunisia, and Kuwait.
Omid Safi, Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center director, told The Christian Post on Wednesday that Muslims around the world are “shocked” at all the “violent and savage attacks” the jihadists keep carrying out.
“But let us be clear: what is most vile is not that these attacks are being carried out during Ramadan, it is that they are being carried out at all. It is that the lives of innocent human beings are being taken,” Safi told CP.
The SOHR report further makes note of ISIS’ “particular interest in children,” and notes that while it has executed dozens, it has also opened up several training camps where young boys are taught jihadist ideology and recruited to fight for ISIS’ forces.
The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child said in a report back in February that the militants are heavily exploiting children in a number of ways.
“We have had reports of children, especially children who are mentally challenged, who have been used as suicide bombers, most probably without them even understanding,” committee expert Renate Winter said at the time. “There was a video placed [online] that showed children at a very young age, approximately 8 years of age and younger, being trained to become child soldiers.”
Source : Christian Post