Islamic State to Christians in Mosul: Convert or Die
By Joseph DeCaro, Worthy News Correspondent
MOSUL (Worthy News)– The Islamic State have distributed leaflets to Christians in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul threatening to kill them if they don’t convert, according to Breitbart News.
“This is ethnic cleansing but nobody is speaking up,” Yonadam Kanna, an Iraqi Christian politician, told Agence France-Presse.
Christians who fail to accept Islam or pay extra taxes to ISIS sharia courts will face “death by the sword”. The tax — called a “jizya” — permits non-Muslims to keep their own religion if they allow themselves to be financially extorted by their Muslim overseers.
Christians who don’t kowtow to either of these Islamic demands were given permission to leave Mosul by “high noon” Saturday or face the consequences. But many who fled Mosul with only what they could carry still left empty-handed.<
“Some families have had all their money and jewelry taken from them at an insurgent checkpoint as they fled the city,” Abu Rayan, a Mosul Christian who left the city with his family told AFP.
The warning to convert or die comes as ISIS withdraws from parts of Mosul to fight Iraqi armed forces in Tikrit.
Mosul, the largest city in northern Iraq, once had a sizable Christian population, but its seizure by ISIS drove out other religious minorities including the Turkmen Shi’ites and the Yazidis, an ethnic Kurdish group that practices a religion linked to Zoroastrianism, according to Creeping Sharia.