D’Abrosca: I’m Syrian, And War in Syria Will Not be Kind to Christians

On the heels of successful strikes against three supposed chemical weapon production centers near Damascus, Syria last week, warhawks in Washington are frothing at the mouth for more.

President Trump declared “mission accomplished” in a Tweet from the morning after the strikes. Hopefully Trump’s use of force against Bashar Al-Assad’s Russian-backed regime is just an intelligent ploy to get neocons off of his back for a while, but there are rumblings that there could be more to come.

The neocon case for military action in Syria goes something like this: Assad allegedly killed 43 of his own people with chemical weapons, and it’s up to the United States to rectify the situation. They have learned absolutely nothing from the failures in Iraq, Libya, and Yemen.

My so-called “conservative” friends assure me that the military has intel proving Assad’s use of chemical weapons, to which I’m simply not privy, justifying our pre-emptive strike. Call me old-fashioned, but I’d like to see the proof, considering that I’m paying for the bombs. There is nothing conservative about starting foreign wars by deposing secular leaders and turning their relatively stable nations into terrorist strongholds, which cost thousands of lives and billions of taxpayer dollars.

Nor is the responsibility of the United States to police the world. Candidate Trump promised an overdue end to the floundering War on Terror, which is 17-years-old still not sanctioned by Congress.

But today, that’s not the sentient point that I’d like to make.

As a Syrian-American and a Christian, I’m opposed to war in Syria for historical truism that when radical Islamic terrorists fill the void in nations once ruled by secular dictators, Christians die en masse. The tragic loss of 43 lives in an alleged chemical attack pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Christians who will suffer if America engages in a full-blown Syrian war.

From 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq, to 2016, the population of Iraqi Christians who once lived in relative peace has declined from 1.4 million to 275,000, according to a report called “Genocide Against Christians in the Middle East.”

According to the report, there are at least 1131 known Christian martyrs in that time period. That figure does not reflect the total death toll – only Christians who are known to have died for refusing to convert to Islam. In the same time period, at least 125 Christian churches have been destroyed by radical terrorists.

In addition, there are thousands Christians in Iraq who have been sold into sex slavery by militant Islamists. The going rate for a a Christian sex slave aged 1-9, called “the spoils of war” by terrorist groups, is 200,000 dinars, or $168 U.S. For about 80 bucks, a Christian sex slave aged 20-30 can be procured for life.

According to a report by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, 900,000 Christians were been killed by Islamic extremists between 2005 and 2015, a clip of 90,000 per year.

In June 2014, 30,000 Christians in Mosul were forced to convert to Islam or flee when ISIS overwhelmed the city. Many fled to the Nineveh Province, which shortly thereafter was assaulted and captured by the terrorists. The Christians fled to the mountainous region surrounding the province. But they had no way of escaping with ISIS surrounding the base of the mountain, and faced the undesirable choice of trying to re-enter the province and evade the terrorists, or starve to death on the mountain. Most chose the latter, and thousands perished.

This is but one example of the hardships faced by Christians in terrorist-controlled regions.

In 2015, ISIS shot and beheaded and 30 Ethiopian Christians living in Libya. This after the United States deposed Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. We came, we saw, he died. Thanks Hillary Clinton’s “diplomacy,” today Libya is in a state of chaos and has thriving slave trade of Nigerian Christians,

The same people whom my ancestors fled to America to avoid – radical Islamists – are the same ones who gain control of formerly stable nations when the United States deposes Middle Eastern dictators, or as RINO’s call it, “spreading democracy.”

The result for the last 17 years has been a Christian genocide.

If you are advocating for war in Syria, you are actively participating in such genocide. Your aims are not noble. No matter how awful you think Bashar Al-Assad is, and no matter how awful he may be, Syria will become a lawless war zone without him. It will be a ripe breeding ground for radical terrorists, and like a recurring nightmare it will mean death for Christianity in that country.

There is a time for war. That time is over now. Many of those who have fought valiantly in the Middle East agree.

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