RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13211/iraq-christians-returning

“Something specific occurred here that requires a specific response. It is called genocide… It is important for these communities to understand that they have a superpower behind them. This is a White House priority. Our goal is to help those communities return to their historic lands.” — Max Primorac, Special Representative for Minority Assistance Programs at USAID, who is responsible for aiding Christians and Yazidis targeted by ISIS.

While roughly a third of the Christians who fled from ISIS in 2014 are returning, the future of their communities in northern Iraq needs political support and a surge of security and economic development. For Christians worldwide, this is our homeland. This is where we began. These are the people we need to protect and help to prosper.

QARAQOSH, Iraq — Christians are gradually returning to their historic homeland in northern Iraq, after three years of ISIS occupation.

The lucky ones managed to flee before the ISIS onslaught in the pre-dawn hours of August 6, 2014, and returned to find their houses intact. Most, however, are facing tremendous damage to their homes and families from a war that pitted neighbor against neighbor, community against community, tearing apart bonds forged over generations.

Yohanna Younis Towaya, 54, a prominent businessman and farmer, returned to find his home burned and looted. “One wall, next to my father’s house, was completely blown out but we repaired it,” he says. His father’s house, next door, he says, has been flattened by an allied air strike: ISIS fighters turned it into a fighting post.

Towaya says he doubts he will ever rebuild his father’s house, like the 116 such buildings in this once-thriving Christian economic center. “ISIS fighters are buried there beneath the rubble,” he says. “Sometimes, you can smell them.”

The smell of the unburied dead is pungent. You can smell it from here in the Christian heartland all the way into ancient Mosul, 12 miles to the west. The area was totally devastated in the final battle to crush ISIS hold-outs fighting from tunnels and underground bunkers.

No one really knows who provided ISIS with their tunneling machines, but there are many of them. On the outskirts of Qaraqosh, members of ISIS had dug a maze of tunnels beneath a Syriac Orthodox monastery at Qortaya to an ancient Assyrian mound 150 meters away. Those firing positions, high enough for an ordinary person to walk upright, allowed them to dominate the surrounding plains.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13190/britain-terror-investigations

If you do not even dare to link terrorism to its source, then surely neither can you prepare for it.

No one seems to be holding roundtable talks with non-Muslim communities across the UK to address their legitimate fears and concerns about religiously-motivated terrorism on their lives.

Perhaps the main reason that terror victims had nowhere to turn is that even after years of living with Islamic terrorism, British authorities and public services still appear to be more concerned with dealing with perceived “Islamophobia” than with the real, devastating consequences of terrorism.

Britain’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Max Hill, recently recommended:

“…the Police should consider and reflect upon the community impact of a large-scale [terror] investigation, centering as it did on particular areas of Manchester with a large Muslim population… Good community policing, as well as good counter-terrorism policing, demands that real efforts are made to work within and with local communities, where many blameless residents will have been inconvenienced if not traumatised by the regular appearance of Police search and arrest teams on their street or in their home. I would like to see the outcome of Police reflections on this aspect…” [Emphasis added]

Hill’s recommendation was published in his recent report on how the UK handles its counter-terrorism efforts. In the report, Hill examines police investigations of the major 2017 terrorist attacks; his recommendation was connected to the investigation into the terrorist attack in Manchester in May 2017, in which Salman Abedi murdered 22 people and injured 139, half of them children, at an Ariana Grande pop concert at the Manchester Arena.