High risk missions: Free Burma Rangers in Myanmar

When ISIS overran Sinjar, newlywed Sousan was captured and forced to become a sex slave for the extremists, being passed from jihadist to jihadist until she made her harrowing escape and was restored to her mother, thanks to the prayers of a former U.S. Army Ranger.

That Ranger was Dave Eubank, an ex-special forces operator turned missionary, who scrapes with death regularly to minister to war-oppressed people from Myanmar to the Middle East. He knows no fear.

Dave became aware of Sousan’s captivity when he met her husband Fouzi in 2015 in the Sinjar mountains that overlooked the city held by ISIS. A Yazidi, Fouzi pleaded for prayers for the restoration of his wife, as related on the website of Free Burma Rangers, the group Dave leads to give immediate aid to people living in extremely dangerous war-torn areas.

While his team ministered medical and dental care to the refugees in the mountains, Dave would sneak down to the frontlines to treat Peshmerga and Kurdish soldiers who were fighting to liberate the city. From the trenches, Dave would gaze at ISIS positions and wonder about Sousan. Was she alive? Would she be freed? He prayed for her and for his new friend Fouzi.

Inside the ISIS stronghold, Sousan was being repeatedly beaten, raped, humiliated and intimidated. She was bought and resold according to the whim of every extremist, who held it perfectly acceptable to exploit and mistreat people based on the Koranic idea that it’s what infidels deserve.

Sousan was Zoroastrian, a minority faith in the Middle East that combines elements of Christianity with Islam. Muslims find this religion particularly abhorrent and subject its adherents to the worst abuse.

When they took over Sinjar, ISIS summarily executed the men from this group and employed their boys for suicide missions. Women became the spoils of war, objects for sexual exploitation.

Sousan’s father is presumed dead. The family has no knowledge of her brother. Her mother and sisters were separated and sold for sex. Sousan was handed off numerous times across Western Iraq until finally she was auctioned off in a stadium in Raqqa, which ISIS adopted as its capitol.

While ISIS retained its grip on the land it seized from Iraq and Syria, Sousan’s fate was sealed.

But outside, the Iraqi and Syrian forces, aided by American and British air bombardments and technical aid, were pounding away at the self-declared Caliphate.

In 2014, Dave was fighting…read the rest: Free Burma Rangers Dave Eubank

Nun on the run | Mosul refugee now serves in Erbil

Sister Hayat

When an ISIS commander demanded over the phone to know where the monastery sisters kept the weapons, Sister Abbess guided him by explanations to the library where he found the Bible.

“The Bible is the only weapon we use,” the abbess told him. “I encourage you to start reading it.”

This story was narrated by Sister Hayat, a 30-year-old Iraqi nun who fled Mosul in the summer of 2014 and is now helping refugees in the City of Erbil, as reported by World Watch Monitor.

Refugees flee Mosul

She lived a quiet life of devotion in a Dominican monastery near Mosul, northern Iraq, caring for children in an orphanage. She also taught athropology at a local university. Then the Islamic State jihadists overan the city.

“When we realized that running was our only option, all the nuns packed a bag,” she said. “We met in the church and prayed, before kissing the floor one last time and closing the door of the monastery behind us.”

Hayat hoped to get back home soon. Instead, the Islamic extremists who decapitated foreigners and raped women entrenched and resisted American bombing and the Iraqi military.

Hayat is serving in a refugee camp in Erbil, where she spent five months caring for elderly nuns.

Tens of thousands of Christians are in as similar predicament. Their homes are now occupied by IS soldier or Muslims neighbors whom they trusted.

The Islamic State, which has formed its own nation with land siezed between Iraq and Syria, now occupies the monastery that Sister Hayat had called home for more than 10 years.

A refugee camp in Erbil.

A few days after fleeing, an IS commander called the abbess, Sister Maria, to taunt her. “Just to let you know, I’m sitting in your chair now and am running things here,” he said.

Then he asked about arms left behind because he couldn’t conceive that such an important building in the community would be without an armory, Hayat said.

That’s when the abbess led him to the library.

“There are no weapons here, just books,” the man shouted through the phone.
She explained the the Bible is the sword of Spirit and is able to change a person from the inside.

Today, Hayat is fatigued from hardships in the refugee camp. When asked about fleeing from her beloved monastery, she can’t hold back the tears. It was the place she consecrated herself to God 14 years earlier.

Since coming, she’s voluntarily endured hardships to express solidarity with others who are fleeing.

At first, “there was no place for me to sleep, but in these eventful days nobody noticed that,” she said. “So I used the laundry room to sleep on the floor. My bag was my pillow and I made a bed of laundry every night. The nuns never knew and I didn’t want them to know I was staying in such a bad condition because I came to serve. That was my way to express my solidarity with all the people on the run.”

Hayat started a prayer meeting among the youth in the camp.

“The needs of the refugees were so huge that we felt the need to begin praying in an organized way,” she said. “It started as a small seed with just a few youth gathered in the garden of a refugee center. They lit candles and prayed silently or out loud. Many prayed things like ‘God, have mercy upon us!’ or ‘God, please let us go back to our homes!’

“People pray for each other’s needs. Whole families show up asking for prayer and pray for others in return.”

Sister Hayat says Christians in Iraq are “confused, in shock, and feel unsafe. They are without identity and feel completely lost in their own country. They’re asking God what He wants them to do. Should they migrate? Or should they stand firmly in this country, accepting what God is doing here? Pray that God opens doors for them and shows them which one to take.”

This article appeared originally in GodReports.com here.

Christian vets join the fight on the ground against Islamic State

The latest foreign fighters to flock into the war zone in Iraq and Syria are Christians who want to do more than their western governments allow.

U.S. vet Jordan Matson engages in firefights regularly with ISIS soldiers alongside pro-Western Syrian Kurds, according to an interview with Fox News.

“I decided that if our government wasn’t going to do anything about it, I would,” says Matson, who’s fought ISIS since September 2014. “We’re getting shot at on pretty much a daily basis. It’s more of a World War II or Vietnam style fight. We don’t have the technology that the United States military has to push our enemies away.”

Read rest of the article here.