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A Turkish ministry at a tent camp less than 25 miles from the Apostle Paul’s hometown of Tarsus gives life-saving aid to those who fled Islamic State (ISIS) crimes against humanity in Syria and Iraq -- a miniscule fraction of the total aid needed in the region, but it means everything to those it touches.Most of the refugees in three tent camps in Adana, in southern Turkey, come from Syria, where nearly four years of civil war have been marked by ISIS militants´ demand for civilians to support their campaign to depose President Bashar Assad and establish a Sunni extremist caliphate or be tortured and killed.
Half of the estimated 210,000 people killed in Syria’s civil war have been civilians, according to the U.K-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. As the group has partisan origins some question its figures, but one of the three tent camps in Turkey appears to bear out the estimate.
“I have spoken with many families in the [73] tents, and in more than 50 percent of them, some family member -- a husband, a wife, a brother --was killed” because they didn’t convert to Islam or otherwise didn’t meet the Islamist or political demands of ISIS or Al Qaeda-backed Al Nusra militants, said the director of the Turkish ministry. “They kidnap the girls and sell them at the bazaar. When they tell me about what they have been facing, you can see the fear and concern that it will happen again.”
Of the estimated 3.7 million Syrian refugees, at least 1.5 million have fled to Turkey, according to United Nations and Turkish government figures. Just as ISIS slaughtered up to 500 people from the ethnoreligious Yazidi community in Iraq in August 2014 and raped and sold many of their young girls in bazaars, the extremist rebels have done the same in Syria, the director said.
“So these pedophile-spirited people also kill whoever is not obeying their ideology,” he said. “Christian people were slaughtered in Iraq and Syria by those Islamic terrorists, too.”
Most of the refugees are from Aleppo, Homs, and Kobani, he said. ISIS has reportedly abandoned Kobani, on Syria’s border with Turkey, after Syrian Kurds, other rebel groups and coalition airstrikes retook it after months of occupation. Other cities in Syria still quake under battles and bombings.
“They told me that when ISIS attacked, they crucified people´s corpses in the city centers so everyone can see, even children,” he said. “Whoever obeys ISIS and lives like they want them to, and accepts the ISIS leader as a prophet, then they´re ok, but people are seeing that they’re cutting peoples’ heads off and crucifying them.”
Many families fled under cover of darkness, leaving all their possessions behind -- home, land, stores, livestock, he said. They ran to save their lives; those who could not run were left to the mercy of the merciless.
