ishtartv.com-
al-monitor.com
Gaja
Pellegrini-Bettoli , July 30, 2015
BEIRUT — They were kidnapped by the Islamic State on Feb. 23 in the governorate
of Hasakah, Syria. A total of 253 Assyrian Christians, from 35 different
villages along the Khabur River. A small group of 23 elderly individuals were
released March 1, allegedly due to their age. Among the sources
who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, the exact number of
those initially abducted varies slightly. Since then, little more has been
learned about the fate of those who are still held hostage. Statements that
could not be confirmed claim that local Sunni leaders are negotiating for the
release of the hostages. Ransom requests by IS reaching $35
million have not been met and a veil of deafening silence has covered the
issue.
A
Christian Assyrian woman released recently agreed to meet with Al-Monitor at
her daughter’s home in the outskirts of Beirut and tell her story of
those months living as an IS hostage and what she could learn about her captors
and their identities. For security reasons, her name will not be
disclosed.
Sitting
on her mattress on the floor, she said she is safe now, but the rest of her
family is still held by IS in Syria’s Shaddadeh. As far as she knows her family
is still there, where they had all been kept since February, when the villages
were attacked.
Reports
on the number of Assyrians living in Syria vary, at times widely. According
to Father Georgio, an Assyrian priest who is assisting Assyrian Syrian refugees
in Lebanon, Assyrians in Syria prior to the conflict numbered around 50,000 and
are now down to roughly 5,000. These figures are unofficial statistics
collected by the local Assyrian churches and communities in Syria.
The
Assyrian Christians living in Syria trace their roots back to Mesopotamians and
speak a modern descendant of Aramaic. They were persecuted by
the Baath Party when Saddam Hussein was in power and many fled to Syria
after 2003, with the flaring of the conflict between the Sunnis and the Shiite
majority in Iraq. They are divided among three main churches: the Syriac
Orthodox Church (Jacobite), the Assyrian Church of East (Nestorian) and
the Chaldean Church of Babylon (Roman Catholic).
The
woman cried during the interview as she explained her feelings of
anguish at the moment of separation from her family. Her daughter, who had been
living in Lebanon for years prior to the beginning of the conflict in Syria and
was present at the interview, cried with her for her sister and
nephews’ fates. Georgio, who was also present, interjected with his
own personal account of what the Assyrian Christian community is undergoing.
Below
is the text of the interview:
Al-Monitor:
What happened when IS reached your town? Was there any resistance? Where
were you and your family when you were abducted?
Assyrian:
We were at home. There had been no time to run away. They stormed in the
door, their faces not covered. They put a gun to my chest and threw an
image of Christ hanging on the wall on the floor. They asked me to step on it.
I had no choice. My daughters and grandchildren were there. They took all of us
to the river. I have broken legs [a physical condition present prior to the IS
attack] so I cannot walk, my daughter had to carry me on her back. No one
posed any resistance. We knew what had transpired in the village of Tel Tamer,
where attempts to resist were made. Anyone who resisted there was killed, the
church was bombed. They burned our house, too, but that I am aware of no one
who was killed. From our village alone they took 85 people. Anyone they found
they took.
Al-Monitor:
Where did they take you afterward, and how were you treated?
Assyrian:
They threw us into a boat that was half full of water and we crossed the
river. Then they put us on trucks to Shaddadeh, another town in the Hasakah
governorate. The first thing they did was to separate the men from the women.
Children under 11 years old would stay with the women. From that moment on, we
never saw the men and boys again. We were allowed, however, to send letters
over to the men and receive theirs. They crammed all of us into a room with a
single window. There was so little room we would take turns lying down to
sleep. We would take turns by the window to breathe better.
Al-Monitor:
You spent over four months in these conditions. How did you and the other
women survive? Did you suffer physical abuse by IS while in captivity?
Assyrian:
I am an elderly woman. What I feared, what we all feared, was abuse
to the girls. Fortunately, that did not happen. We lived in the constant
fear of it but while I was there we were not beaten, nor were there other forms
of physical abuse. The psychological fear was tremendous. We were all held
together in the same room: all women and children up to age 11. We slept very
little and were constantly trying to cover our faces from the captors. We
prayed six times a day. This gave us hope.
There
were many children in the group. The youngest was only 2 months old. I remember
there was a pregnant woman who went into labor and delivered her baby there. We
don’t know much about how the men and boys were being treated. We were kept in
a separate building. We could not hear any noise or see anything through the
only window we had access to. We could only see IS men outside. During the
entire period I was there, we never left the building. We lived in the same
clothes and were allowed to wash a little once a week.
Al-Monitor:
Where you able to learn anything about your captors?
Assyrian:
I did not recognize their faces, which I could see because they were not
covered. But I could recognize their accents. They were local Syrians from
Hasakah. There must have been roughly 100 men who took over our village.
Initially they seemed to be many more, but it was probably just the shock
effect of seeing them arrive and the fear we felt. When we reached Shaddadeh, I
heard some men who did not speak Arabic and a few foreigners. By foreigner I
mean not Syrian. An IS jihadist would come to the room where we were kept
hostage every Saturday and tell us that if we agreed to convert, we would be
set free. It became a ritual, every week on Saturday. One day a jihadist
directed this offer to me and, debilitated and exhausted, I
answered, “Look at me, I could be your mother. You stay with your religion
and I stay with mine.”
Al-Monitor:
Most news coverage of treatment by IS of Christians or other minorities,
such as the Yazidi, is rife with brutality, shocking not just the direct
victims but everyone reading about it or watching their images. Comparatively,
in your case, the level of brutality appears to have been contained. Why do
think this is the case?
Assyrian:
Our lives were destroyed. I don’t know why we were not beaten or worse,
but I can tell you that for the entire time we lived in extreme fear. We were
constantly threatened verbally. They would say to us, “We know everything
about you. You speak and you are dead.” In our group no one accepted the IS
"offer" to convert to be freed. But we knew that those who put
up physical resistance from other villages were killed.
Al-Monitor:
Why were you released and how did you feel having to leave the rest of
your family in captivity?
Assyrian:
The living conditions in that small room caused my physical condition to
deteriorate rapidly. My legs, which were broken before I was kidnapped, swelled
up. I lost weight, I was very weak. I think they thought I was going
to die. I am not aware that a ransom was paid but I cannot be sure. They took
me to the town of Hasakah by car. The person who drove me there was the same IS
member who would usually bring us food. They left me at the church in the care
of the priest. The priest offered the man who drove me some money for having
taken me there. At first he refused, and then he took it. From there I was
taken to the nearest hospital to check my physical condition.
I
did not want to leave without them. The moment when they separated us to take
me away, we were both crying.
Al-Monitor:
Do you have news about your family since your release and who is
negotiating for the group to be freed?
Assyrian:
I have received very little news about their condition. An Assyrian priest is
trying to negotiate for the release of the entire group of hostages. From what
I am told they are alive.
Al-Monitor:
The European Union has been criticized for not doing enough to help
civilians who are fleeing, among other countries, war-torn Syria seeking refuge
in Europe. Lebanon, for example, has been overwhelmed by the number of
civilians crossing its borders and struggling to manage the number of refugees.
What do you think Europe and its institutions should do to help civilians
fleeing war zones?
Georgio:
We receive no support. We feel completely abandoned. I try to support the
Assyrian refugees with my church but there were a total of 1,400 families at a
time, between those who fled from Mosul in Iraq and from Syria. It was
impossible to provide the needed support to everyone. Europe is silent, not
hearing our pleas for help. For many Assyrians, this is not the first time we
have been displaced — first from Iraq to Syria, due to persecution
under Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, and now to Lebanon.
Al-Monitor:
How are you able to live here in Lebanon? Do you have family here, or do
you have the help of the Assyrian community here?
Assyrian:
I am lucky to have one of my daughters here. She moved to Lebanon years ago and
lives here with her family. I live with her at her house. We receive some help
from the Assyrian community. Father Georgio, an Assyrian priest based in [the
Beirut suburb of] Hadath, helps us. We do not receive any help from the
government or from other institutions dealing with refugees.