Even as the Western intelligentsia continue to focus upon the fake and inflated refugee crisis among Palestinians, the world’s real refugee crisis– Christians and Yazidis persecuted by ISIS– has become both overwhelming and hidden in plain sight.
There may be sixty million refugees and “internally displaced people” in all, primarily from Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Congo, and other countries. Nine and a half million “refugees” and “internally displaced people” are Syrians. Some now live in refugee camps in Jordan, Israel (where they are also treated in hospitals), Lebanon, Iraq, and on the Syrian-Turkish border. Half are children. Most of the children are no longer in school; worse, unvaccinated, they remain in deadly danger of contracting polio and measles in addition to other camp related diseases such as dysentery. Families are destitute and cannot afford the emergency surgeries that will save young lives, limbs, or eyes.
One young Yazidi girl, “Dilleen” (pictured), has been suffering from retinal blastoma which, according to her advocate, Gulie Khalaf, “has moved to her other eye and, without surgery, will move to her brain. She is unable to see from either eye.” Surgeons will perform the operation in Dohuk and her advocates are trying to raise money for it.
Many children are also starving and at best, severely undernourished. “Lucky” young Muslim virgin girls are being given in marriage to much older Muslim men in Jordan and the Gulf States in the hope that they will be fed and cared for. “Unlucky” Christian and Yazidi girls and women are being kidnapped and used as sex slaves by ISIS–something these barbarians view as an Islamic religious right.
President Obama’s “international community,” beginning with the United Nations, has not taken responsibility for any of this. Individual countries have accepted refugees, but they do not have the resources to accept them all–and to feed, house, educate, and integrate them. Europe is terrified of being overwhelmed by refugees who are illiterate, dependent, and hostile to the Western enterprise; who may be jihadists; and whose predecessor-refugees are known for their high crime rates, refusal to become “Western,” and for their creation of lawless or Shari’a run “no-go” zones all over Europe.
Enter individual heroes. Sister Hatune Dogan and Hans Erling Jensen, the International Director of the Hatune Foundation, have been rescuing Christian and Yazidi girls and women from Iraq and bringing them to Europe for medical and psychological treatment. Last month, I was privileged to meet with Hans Erling Jensen in Europe. He described the work he and Sister Hatune are doing and I was very moved and excited. Here is a 4-minute interview he conducted with Sister Hatune. She described her monthly visits to the rescued girls in this way: “I give them my shoulder to cry on. There is little more relief we can offer until we get them to Europe.”
Since January of 2014, the Hatune Foundation has freed “317 Christian and Yazidi girls from the hands of ISIS.” In addition, with the help of “partners,” the Foundation has been involved in “280 additional releases.” As of this moment, “200 women and girls are now under professional care in Germany where “they now live in a safe environment while they are trying to get back to life after their traumatic experiences as an Islamic State captive.”
Sister Hatune is five feet tall. She wears a nun’s black habit and a large cross. She does so in places where Christianity is not only despised and under siege but where, over the centuries, it has been decimated by Muslims. Christians now comprise only 4-5% of the population in Middle East and Central Asian countries, where Christianity began and once flourished. Sister Hatune is particularly passionate on this subject.
She is doing God’s work and believes that God will protect her.
This past July, she flew to Istanbul, where she and her team provided “financial support to more than 400 people… and psychological support to 32 who really needed this.” She went to eastern Turkey and provided financial support to some Christian villages who needed “food, medicine, and clothing.” Undaunted, she then went to the refugee camp Chanek in Iraq where “51,000 Yazidi families live among 500,000 other people.”
Sister Hatune encountered “catastrophic medical conditions.” She found children with “black blisters in their faces caused by flies– flies, that infected the children after they had spent several days with their dead relatives in hiding from ISIS. There was a woman with worms in her foot that came out of large black holes.”
She believes that a mobile clinic is necessary and has launched a campaign to fund it.
This brave soul then went to the Sinjar Shingal mountains. “Thirteen Yazidi fighters covered her” as she went to “the front lines.” She reports that “right now, there are 30,000 Yazidi fighters trying to stop the expansion of ISIS in this area. They live in 2,000 tents, in open camps in the mountains. They get neither support from the West or from the Kurds.”
She personally interviewed a young Yazidi girl who had been held captive by ISIS for two months. She was fourteen years old. “She was raped five to ten times every day. She couldn’t express what she had been through. ‘I was dead–killed–hundreds of times’ she says. She knew of many girls that had jumped from a high rock to kill themselves because they could not live on with the shame.”
This young girl is now safe. She has joined others who had been sold on the slave markets in Mosul and Rakka where girls are being sold again and again. One girl who is now with Sister Hatune had been sold eleven times.
In her latest newsletter, Sister Hatune thanks her Foundation’s Director and friend Hans Erling Jensen, and all those who have sent donations. She writes: “Without [their] support, I would be a bird without wings.”
You may donate to this heroic cause and to the mobile clinic.
You may donate to help defray the cost of eye surgery for the Yazidi child who will become blind.
May God bless you for upholding and representing the very best of Western values.
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