Iraq Christians Tell Tales of Survival in the 'Caliphate'

Ahram Online ^ | 11/15/16 | AFP

[marshmallow]

They were threatened, forced to spit on a crucifix or convert to Islam, but a handful of Iraqi Christians miraculously survived more than two years under Islamic State group rule.

When the jihadists swept across the Nineveh Plain in northern Iraq in August 2014 and told Christians to convert, pay tax, leave or die, around 120,000 of them fled.

Now that Iraqi forces have retaken many of those areas around the city of Mosul, stories are emerging of those who did not get a chance to leave and faced one of the three other options.

Ismail Matti was 14 when IS militants stormed his hometown of Bartalla, east of Mosul.

He waited for relatives who had already fled to come back for him and his sick mother, Jandar Nasi, but nobody did.

They tried to flee in taxis but were turned around twice by IS and ended up in a Mosul prison.

"There were Shiite people crammed in a cell next to ours -- they took one, shot him in the head and dragged his body in front of us," he said.

"They told my mother the same thing would happen to me if we refused to convert. So we converted," Ismail recounted from a church-run shelter in the Kurdish capital Arbil.

The pair went back to Bartalla and were then sent to the village of Shurikhan, on the western outskirts of Mosul.

"All our neighbours were Daesh," he said, using an Arab acronym for IS. "They would come to check if I was following the sharia (Islamic law)."

"If they found that I hadn't been to the mosque to pray, I sometimes got lashes," Ismail said.

He suffered the same fate in their next temporary home in Bazwaya, east of Mosul.

Ismail would sometimes get food from friendly residents........