https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271855/mosul-and-true-face-islam-kenneth-r-timmerman
I have lived and worked in the Muslim Middle East for the past thirty-five years, and have many dear friends who are Muslims. Most recently, I prayed with a 38-year old Muslim man in the ruins of his house in the old city of Mosul, as he told me his story of surviving the ISIS occupation.
I stumbled upon Azam Nejim Abdallah by accident, while inspecting the devastation wrought upon the magnificent 4th and 5th century churches of West Mosul with an Iraqi police brigadier general and activists from the Hammurabi Human Rights Organization, a local group dedicated to protecting Iraqi minorities.
Azam and an older neighbor, Abu Ibrahim Mohsen, were among the hardy few who had returned to the ruins and were attempting to rebuild. Their problem on this particular day was that they had no water, and no electricity. “People just three blocks down the street have water,” they complained to the brigadier general. Why not us?”
To us, the answer was obvious. The fact that Azam and his neighbors were alive was nothing short of miraculous. One neighbor’s house was just a pile of rubble. Bomb squads were still combing through the neighborhood, more than a year after the liberation, for ISIS booby-traps and unexploded ordinance. There was not a single house left standing in the neighborhood. Water? Electricity? Really?
When Azam saw me, he wanted to tell me the story of how his four-year son and father were killed in the final days of the ISIS occupation. He kept pointing to an alleyway, and in the end, I let him take me by the hand to his house a bit further away. He had already started to rebuild the walls, but that wasn’t what he wanted to show me: it was a picture of his four-year old son, Omar, and the jagged hole a coalition bomb had torn through a metal door. “I was crouching, right there,” he pointed. “Omar was crouching here, with my father. They were both killed,” he wept. All I could do as he showed me a photograph of his son was to pray with him.
I am reminded of this story by an encounter with a pastor in an Anglican church in Europe recently, who commented that ISIS and all their barbarity were “such a distortion of true Islam.”
