The Slaughter in Syria - Convert or Die

In 1571, the forces of Ottoman Sultan Selim II besieged the city of Famagusta on the island of Cyprus. It was the last major stronghold in the hands of the Venetians, who controlled Cyprus at that point. After a year-long siege, the Venetian forces agreed to surrender the city. The Ottoman commander Lala Mustafa Pasha promised to grant safe passage to its defenders.

That agreement lasted just long enough to let the Ottomans inside. Then they slaughtered everyone in the city except the commander, Marcantonio Bragadin. For him, they reserved a particularly grizzly fate. They cut off his ears and his nose and toyed with him for two weeks, making him carry bags of earth around the city walls while the Ottoman troops jeered and taunted him. Then they skinned him alive and stuffed his skin with straw. That horrific scarecrow was hoisted to the yard arm of an Ottoman ship, which then sailed to Constantinople to deliver the trophy to the Sultan.

The world may have changed for many of us since then. It has not changed for jihadists. When you are waging Holy War there are no innocents. No quarter is given.

Jihadists do not want coexistence. They do not want a homeland in which they can live peacefully. They seek world domination. For them, you can select two fates. You can convert to Islam, or you can be annihilated.

Which brings us to Syria.

Syria is now controlled by an Islamic terrorist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). HTS is an offshoot of Al-Qaida. Some time back HTS made a big show of announcing it was no longer affiliated with AQ. That was a PR stunt. It changed nothing. Their policies remained the same.

HTS’s leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, and the de facto ruler of Syria, now appears before the cameras for press events wearing a suit rather than Islamic garb. That too is a PR move for Western audiences. He is a jihadist who fought American forces in Iraq and is as dedicated to world domination as Bin Laden ever was.

HTS fighters are now slaughtering men, women and children in Syria who belong to faiths other than Islam. Over the last week, they may have killed as many as 4000 people. These were Christians of several denominations, including Greek Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, Maronite Catholic, and others. HTS terrorists have also slaughtered many Alawites, a Shia Muslim minority group that has traditionally lived side-by-side, in peace with Syria's Christians.

The director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdulrahman, confirmed today that massacres perpetrated by Islamist regime forces in Syria are continuing unabated. According to his report, forces are systematically burning homes and conducting additional killings throughout the coastal region, home to Syria's Alawite minority. Abdulrahman stated that documentation exists for 745 Alawites murdered on sectarian grounds in what constitutes ethnic cleansing, describing these actions as "a war crime committed by the new government."

People are being lined up against walls and shot. Artillery and drones are being used. This is not a case of a handful of rogue individuals. This is genocide.

The UN commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, called on Sunday for investigations into the killings and for perpetrators to be held accountable. “We are receiving extremely disturbing reports of entire families, including women, children and hors de combat [surrendered] fighters, being killed,” he said in a statement. “The killing of civilians in coastal areas in north-west Syria must cease, immediately.”

In a joint statement on March 8th, the three patriarchs of the largest Christian communities in Syria strongly condemned the violence. In their joint statement, the Patriarchs in Syria denounced the “dangerous escalation of violence, brutality, and killings, resulting in attacks on innocent civilians, including women and children.”

“The Christian Churches, while strongly condemning any act that threatens civil peace, denounce and condemn the massacres targeting innocent civilians, and call for an immediate end to these horrific acts, which stand in stark opposition to all human and moral values,” the statement says.

On Sunday, Syria’s jihadist ruler, Ahmed al-Sharaa, said the developments were within “expected challenges” and called for national unity. “We have to preserve national unity and domestic peace; we can live together,” he said in a video circulated by Arab media. How murdering thousands of people in cold blood can be described as a “challenge” is unclear. Presumably, the national unity of which al-Sharaa speaks will come when everyone who professes a different faith has stopped breathing.

Meanwhile, the new Ottomans, the Turkish allies of HTS are waging war on the Kurds in northeast Syria. Turkish forces supported by air strikes are attacking Kurdish forces and steadily occupying portions of Syria and annexing them to Turkey. The effort will continue for the foreseeable future. Its goal is the extermination of all Kurds in Syria as part of President Erdogan’s vision of a restoration of the glories of the Ottoman Empire.

The Biden administration did everything it could to feed the American people the narrative that somehow the threat of Islamic extremism had gone away. It has not. Nothing has changed other than that we have worked overtime to ignore the growing danger.

The modern day soldiers of Allah do not want coexistence any more than the Ottoman forces that overran Famagusta did. Their goal remains the same. Your choice. Convert or die.