Christian Today report– The United Nations is expressing alarm over the emergence of videos that show food parcels distributed by the UN World Food Programme emblazoned with Islamic State logos.

According to Reuters, images have surfaced in social media that show cardboard boxes with papers carrying the Islamic State logo pasted on them and being distributed to refugees. The images allegedly depict refugees in Deir Hafr village in Syria, where the WFP had delivered food parcels with one month of supplies to 8,500 people in August.

WFP Emergency Regional Coordinator Muhannad Hadi blasted this latest attempt at propaganda by the Islamic State.

“WFP condemns this manipulation of desperately needed food aid inside Syria,” he told Reuters through a statement issued on Monday. Hadi also said that the WFP is working to validate the authenticity of the images.

The World Food Programme works with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent Organisation to distribute food aid to the people in Syria. According to the SARC, negotiations are carried out between them and all parties on the ground including the Islamic State prior to commencement of distribution.

“We negotiate for access, we always do this,” Vivian Tou’meh, SARC head of communications, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Tou’meh also said that SARC volunteers deliver the food packages themselves on behalf of the WFP.

WFP also told Reuters that the Islamic State had carried out a raid in SARC’s warehouses in September. The WFP alleged that the warehouses may have stored food parcels including packages from the WFP itself.

A radical Islamic extremist group that first emerged in June last year, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria aims to “create a broader Islamic caliphate.” Reuters said that the group has to keep the public fed in order to depict its fledgling state as a genuine caliphate in the eyes of the international community.

Source: Christian Today

Christian Today report- Islamic State said on Friday that an American woman hostage it was holding in Syria was killed when Jordanian fighter jets bombed a building where she was being held, but Jordan expressed doubt about the Islamist militant group’s account of her death.

In Washington, US officials said they could not confirm that the woman, 26-year-old humanitarian worker Kayla Mueller of Prescott, Arizona, had been killed.

Her family said in a statement on Friday they are hopeful she is alive and asked Islamic State to contact them.

Mueller was the last-known American hostage held by Islamic State, which controls wide areas of Syria and Iraq.

The group has beheaded three other Americans, two Britons and two Japanese hostages – most of them aid workers or journalists – in recent months. Mueller was taken hostage while leaving a hospital in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo in August 2013.

The group’s latest claim, detailed by the SITE monitoring group, came just days after it released a video on Tuesday showing a captured Jordanian pilot, Mouath al-Kasaesbeh, being burned alive in a cage.

Jordan’s King Abdullah, who was in Washington discussing how to deal with Islamic State militants when the video was made public, vowed to avenge the pilot’s death and ordered a stepped-up military role in the US-led coalition against the group.

Jordan said it had carried out a second straight day of air strikes on Friday on Islamic State positions.

“We are looking into it but our first reaction is that we think it is illogical and we are highly sceptical about it. It’s part of their criminal propaganda,” government spokesman Mohammad Momani said in response to Islamic State’s account of what happened to Mueller.

“How could they identify Jordanian war planes from a huge distance in the sky? What would an American woman be doing in a weapons warehouse?” Momani said.

Hours after the release of the video showing the pilot burning to death, Jordanian authorities executed two al Qaeda militants who had been imprisoned on death row, including a woman who had tried to blow herself up in a suicide bombing and whose release had been demanded by Islamic State.

WHITE HOUSE ‘DEEPLY CONCERNED’

In a statement released by a family representative, Mueller’s parents, Carl and Marsha Mueller of Arizona, asked the Islamic State group to contact the family privately.

“You told us that you treated Kayla as your guest, as your guest her safety and well-being remains your responsibility,” they said in a message directed to “those in positions of responsibility for holding Kayla”.

They also said: “Kayla found this (aid) work heart-breaking but compelling; she is extremely devoted to the people of Syria.

“When asked what kept her going in her mission, she said, ‘I find God in the suffering eyes reflected in mine, if this is how you are revealed to me, this is how I will forever seek you.'”

White House National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said the United States was “deeply concerned” over the report but had not seen “any evidence that corroborates” the group’s account.

Islamic State, in a message monitored by SITE, said Mueller died when the building in which she was being held outside Raqqa, a stronghold of the group, collapsed in a Jordanian air strike on Friday.

“The air assaults were continuous on the same location for more than an hour,” Islamic State said, according to SITE.

The group released photos of what it said were the building’s wreckage but did not include photos of Mueller.

French journalist Nicolas Henin, a former captive of the group in Syria who gained his freedom last April, said on Twitter: “Kayla Mueller was among the very last of my former cellmates still detained. I was full of hope she could have a way out.”

The US military last summer carried out an unsuccessful mission to rescue American hostages held by the group in Syria.

Reuters and other Western news organizations were aware Mueller was being held hostage but did not name her at the request of her family members, who believed the militants would harm her if her case received publicity.

‘WHERE IS THE WORLD?’

Mueller, a 2009 Northern Arizona University graduate, had a long record of volunteering abroad and was moved by the plight of civilians in Syria’s civil war.

“For as long as I live, I will not let this suffering be normal – something we just accept,” Mueller’s local newspaper The Daily Courier quoted her in 2013 as saying.

“When Syrians hear I’m an American, they ask, ‘Where is the world?’ All I can do is cry with them, because I don’t know,” Mueller said.

She had worked for a Turkish aid organisation on the Syrian border and volunteered for schools and aid organisations abroad including in the West Bank, Israel and India.

“The common thread of Kayla’s life has been her quiet leadership and strong desire to serve others,” according to a statement from her family’s representative.

Islamic State previously executed American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aid worker Peter Kassig, British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning, Japanese journalist Kenji Goto and Goto’s friend, Haruna Yukawa.

Among the hostages still thought to be held by the group is British photojournalist John Cantlie.

Jordan is a major US ally in the fight against militant Islamist groups. It is home to US military trainers bolstering defences at the Syrian and Iraqi borders, and is determined to keep the jihadists in Syria and Iraq from crossing its frontiers.

Source: Christian Today

Christian Today report-

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has a clear view of what women’s role in society is – and that is to cook, clean, and sew, and a girl can do that for her militant husband as early as age nine.

In a 10,000-word manifesto entitled “Women in the Islamic State: Manifesto and Case Study” uploaded by the all-female Al-Khanssaa Brigade’s media wing, it was deemed “legitimate” for girls nine years old and up to be married to militants and stressed their quiet roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers.

The document stressed the “sedentary” role women play in their society, and it slammed Western women for their claims on gender equality.

The manifesto was written in Arabic and translated by Charlie Winter, a researcher on jihadism in Syria and Iraq at the counter extremism think-tank the Quilliam Foundation.

Winter believes that the document serves as a means for ISIS to lure more women from the West to join their forces. He said that Western recruits have posted pictures of themselves on social media accounts, with a woman from south London living in Syria claiming that she wants to be the first woman to behead a Western hostage.

“I think that Western women have a motive to recruit other Western women. This document has a motive – recruiting women from the Gulf. The reflection that it gives of an idealised position of women is at lot closer to the reality than what our British girls are saying, for example talking about joining police forces and training for battle,” he told The Independent.

“The document will be exaggerated and not a completely accurate reflection of what life is like, but what it does give us is a conceptual treatise of what life should be like and that’s something that we haven’t seen yet, at least not in English,” added Winter. “Somebody will have made a decision not to circulate a manifesto like this in English because it contains uncomfortable ideas that may not sit well with the average Western girl looking to join the group.”

The manifesto said that it is women’s “divinely appointed right” in accordance with Shariah law to fulfill their responsibilities at home. Their education should begin at the age of seven and be completed by the age of 15, with the curriculum focusing on Islamic religious studies, Koranic Arabic and learning basic cooking, knitting and other skills.

It added that there is no need for women to “flit here and there to get degrees and so on just so she can try to prove that her intelligence is greater than a man’s.”

However, there are times when a woman can leave her duties at home to serve as doctors or teachers, or even  for jihad but only “by appointment” if the militant groups are in need of her services. Their work outside home should only take place three days a week and “must be appropriate for her and her abilities and not involve more than what she is able to endure, or what is difficult for her to achieve”.

Winter warned people not to buy in to the idealism of the manifesto since “in a jihadist perversion of feminism, the importance of women is championed. She is deemed to play a central role.”

“However, this is only insomuch as the jihadist ideology permits her. She may be important, but she faces myriad restrictions and an imposed piety that is punishable by hudud (fixed) punishments,” he reasoned.

Source: Christian Today

Christian Today report– The Islamic State has stated that its goal is to establish an Islamic caliphate in Syria and Iraq, but an interview with a former captive revealed that the group apparently does not care about religion.

French journalist Didier Francois told CNN‘s Christine Amanpour that discussions with his Islamic State captors were never religious in nature.

“There was never really discussion about texts or — it was not a religious discussion. It was a political discussion,” Francois stated in the interview. “It was more hammering what they were believing than teaching us about the Koran.”

Francois also said that he and his fellow captives were not even given copies of the Koran to study.

“We didn’t even have the Koran,” the former ISIS captive revealed. “They didn’t want even to give us a Koran.”

Francois concluded that the Islamic State’s beliefs have “nothing to do with the Koran.”

In addition to the discussions, Francois also told the CNN anchor that ISIS subjected them to beatings periodically.

“Of course we were beaten up. But it was not every day. I mean, it’s hard enough — you don’t have to overplay it,” Francois revealed. “The beating is strong, but it’s not every day. It happens sometimes.”

He also revealed that the British jihadists, whom the rest of the Islamic State’s fighters refer to as “The Beatles,” were “harsher in their violence” towards the captives. They provided the captives with better food than the other Islamic fighters, Francois said, but they also beat them harder.

Francois, together with Edouard Elias, Didier, Nicolas Hénin and Pierre Torres, were released in April 2014 after 10 months of captivity at the hands of the Islamic State. He and his colleagues were one of the few hostages that the ISIS ever released.

There was speculation that France paid a ransom for their release, but Francois denied that during the CNN interview. He called the rumours “utterly ridiculous.”

“We were lucky,” he said.

Source: Christian Today

Christian Today  report– The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s immolation of a Jordanian pilot on Tuesday triggered a wave of outrage among the top clerics in the Islamic world.

Leading the condemnation is the Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar, Ahmed al-Tayeb, who expressed “deep anger over the lowly terrorist act” in a statement issued to Reuters on Wednesday.

Al-Tayeb further described the Islamic state as a “Satanic, terrorist” organisation and said that the Islamic State’s fighters should also be “killed, crucified or to have their limbs amputated” as punishment for burning the young Arab pilot, Lt. Mouath al-Kasaesbeh.

Other Muslim clerics around the world joined Ahmed al-Tayeb in condemning the immolation.

Youssef al-Qaradawi and the International Association of Muslim Scholars called the burning a “criminal act” and told Reuters that ISIS “does not represent Islam in any way and its actions always harm Islam.”

The Washington Post reported that Iyad Madani, who heads the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, described the burning of the pilot as an “affront to Islam.”

“[ISIS] utterly disregards the rights of prisoners Islam has decreed, as well as the human moral standards for war and treatment of prisoners,” Madani told the Washington Post’s correspondent.

Even other jihadists have spoken out against the burning. Reuters interviewed Abu Sayyaf, who said that the latest atrocity “weakens the popularity of Islamic State.” Sayaf said that filming the video and releasing it to the public has “turned society” against the Islamic State.

Sayaf, also known as Mohamed al-Shalabi, is a Jordanian salafist who served 10 years in prison for jihadist activity that included a bomb plot against the United States.

Hishan al-Hashimi, a top advisor in the Iraqi government, however, told the Washington Post that ISIS may have “gained more from this than it has lost” despite widespread condemnation of the burning. According to Al-Hashimi, the group managed to turned public attention away from its defeats in Kobani in Syria and in Diyala in Iraq when it released the video of the immolation.

Source: Christian Today