Actions of the Islamic State of Iraq & Syria (ISIS) - In IraqPosted: 2014-10-10
Sabah Hajji Hassan, a 68-year-old Yazidi, in recounting the recent jihad massacres of his people, noted that “the worst killings came from the people living among us, our [Sunni] Muslim neighbors….The Metwet, Khawata and Kejala tribes – they were all our neighbours. But they joined the IS, took heavy weapons from them, and informed on who was Yazidi and who was not. Our neighbours made the IS takeover possible.”
Two weeks earlier, a Christian refugee from Mosul said much the same thing: that his Sunni Muslim neighbors “said that this land belongs to Islam and that Christians should not live there…We left Mosul because ISIS came to the city. The [Sunni] people of Mosul embraced ISIS and drove the Christians out of the city. When ISIS entered Mosul, the people hailed them and drove out the Christians.”
There are innumerable other examples of this phenomenon, such as Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s 9/11/11 throat-slitting murder of his Jewish “best friend.” In September 2013, Christians in Maaloula, Syria, said that their Muslim neighbors had aided jihad attacks against them. And in July 2014, Christian refugees from Mosul said that their Muslim neighbors had helped drive them out of the city.
An anecdote from the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century:
Then one night, my husband came home and told me that the padisha had sent word that we were to kill all the Christians in our village, and that we would have to kill our neighbours. I was very angry, and told him that I did not care who gave such orders, they were wrong. These neighbours had always been kind to us, and if he dared to kill them Allah would pay us out. I tried all I could to stop him, but he killed them — killed them with his own hand. (Sir Edwin Pears, Turkey and Its People)
What could account for this? An overriding loyalty, delineated in the Quran: “O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you – then indeed, he is one of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people.” (5:51) This extends even to family members: the Quran says that Abraham gives an “excellent example” to Muslims when he tells his pagan family that there is now “enmity and hatred” between them and him until they worship Allah alone (60:4). And:“O you who have believed, do not take your fathers or your brothers as allies if they have preferred disbelief over belief. And whoever does so among you – then it is those who are the wrongdoers” (9:23).
And so when the local Muslim leadership calls on Muslims to act on those hatreds, they will find some who will obey.
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