Iraqi Christian Men Join the Fight Against ISIS and Here’s Why

Photo Credit: Daily Signal By Josh Siegel. Athra Kado had never shot a gun before, let alone seen a battlefield.

Until recently Kado, 25, spent his young career in a classroom, teaching high school students how to speak Syriac, his native language.

But Kado is one of hundreds of Assyrian Christian men—many with no military experience—taking up arms to protect their towns from ISIS terrorists who invaded this part of Iraq early last year.

“If we don’t have land to live, what’s the purpose of teaching a language?” Kado tells The Daily Signal in a Skype interview from a former U.S. military facility outside the city of Kirkuk, where he is finishing up a training camp with 500 or so amateur fighters.

Recruits to the new Christian militia, or battalion, say their villages and families were abandoned by Iraqi government and peshmerga forces last summer, letting the terrorists seize control. (Read more about the Iraqi Christian men joining the fight against ISIS HERE)

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Army Veteran Joins the Fight Against ISIS in Iraq

By Newsmax. Saint Michael, the archangel of battle, is tattooed across the back of a U.S. army veteran who recently returned to Iraq and joined a Christian militia fighting Islamic State in what he sees as a biblical war between good and evil.

Brett, 28, carries the same thumb-worn pocket Bible he did whilst deployed to Iraq in 2006 – a picture of the Virgin Mary tucked inside its pages and his favourite verses highlighted.

“It’s very different,” he said, asked how the experiences compared. “Here I’m fighting for a people and for a faith, and the enemy is much bigger and more brutal.”

Thousands of foreigners have flocked to Iraq and Syria in the past two years, mostly to join Islamic State, but a handful of idealistic Westerners are enlisting as well, citing frustration their governments are not doing more to combat the ultra-radical Islamists or prevent the suffering of innocents.

The militia they joined is called Dwekh Nawsha – meaning self-sacrifice in the ancient Aramaic language spoken by Christ and still used by Assyrian Christians, who consider themselves the indigenous people of Iraq. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Despite ISIS Forcing Her Out of Her Home, Young Girl Asks God to Forgive the ISIS Militants

By Samuel Smith. Even though her village was seized by the Islamic State and she’s now living a rough life in an unfinished mall in Kurdish-protected Northern Iraq, a displaced Christian refugee child is asking God to “forgive” the ISIS militants.

After ISIS seized most of the Mosul region of Iraq last June, over 400 mostly Christian displaced Iraqi families from the villages of Qaraqosh, Bartella and Kharamles descended upon the Kurdish capital of Erbil to live in a half-built mall in the in the Christian neighborhood of Ainkawa.

As the families had picked up and fled their villages in a hurry before the ISIS militants reached their towns, the families could only afford to bring bare necessities and are now living in the mall without much more than the mattresses, blankets and other handouts they receive from humanitarian organizations.

A correspondent with the Arabic Christian television network SAT-7’s “Kids” program interviewed children living in the Ainkawa Mall’s refugee camp and asked them what they missed the most about their lives back home.

In talking with the reporter and camera crew, a little girl named Myriam, from Qaraqosh, assured that although her life has changed drastically in the last year and her family’s future remains uncertain, God continues to provide for her and her family. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Vicar of Baghdad Warns Westerners: Don’t Join Christian Militia Against ISIS, Christians Are ‘Hopeless at Fighting’

By Leonardo Blair. Concerned about reports that some idealistic Christian sympathizers have been moving to Iraq and Syria to join the fight against ISIS, the Vicar of Baghdad, Rev. Canon Andrew White, warned against the trend this week because, he said, the Christian militia fighting against ISIS in Iraq is “hopeless at fighting.”

Recounting a conversation he had with one of his Iraqi Christian guards to Christian Today while on a fundraising mission in Tennessee, White explained that the Christian fighters are “universally hopeless at fighting, let alone fighting ISIS.”

“I said to him (Iraqi Christian guard), ‘What would you do if ISIS were coming toward us?’ He said, ‘I would rip off my uniform and run.’ So I said, ‘Why do you do this job?’ He said, ‘I do it because I need the money,'” said White.

“Christians are no good at being soldiers. If going to join the new militia makes them feel good, great. But it will achieve absolutely nothing. We are dealing with an evil, evil regime as we saw in Libya with the beheadings of the Coptic Christians. There is very little that any Iraqi Christian or British Christian can do to help. The best thing they can do is stay at home,” he added. (Read more from this story HERE)

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