The Jim Bakker Show

Sold by Islamic State, bought by strangers: Yazidi child reunited with family

By Isabel Coles

RASHIDIYA, Iraq (Reuters) – His name was Ayman, but the couple who brought the boy home to their Iraqi village after buying him for $500 called him Ahmed.

Islamic State militants had killed or enslaved Ayman’s parents in their purge of the Yazidi religious minority to which he belongs, then sold the four-year-old to Umm and Abu Ahmed, who are Muslims.

For the 18 months he lived with the couple, his relatives assumed he was dead, one of several thousand Yazidis who have been missing since the militants overran their homes in what the United Nations has called genocide.

When Iraqi forces retook east Mosul and the surrounding area last week, they found Ayman and returned him to what is left of his family. While their reunion was full of joy, breaking the bond between Ayman and his adoptive parents brought new sorrow.

Speaking to Reuters journalists brought by Iraqi forces to his home in Rashidiya, north of Mosul, Abu Ahmed swiped through photographs of the boy on his phone: “That’s him riding a bicycle here. That’s him standing in our hall. That’s an exercise machine he played on.”

The windows of the couple’s one-story home on the eastern bank of the Tigris river have been shattered by a blast that destroyed their neighbor’s house, evidence of the fierce fighting that will continue when the army attacks the western side, which is still controlled by Islamic State.

Abu Ahmed emptied the contents of a box onto the bed Ayman used to share with them: toy cars and building blocks, and a children’s book for learning Arabic script.

It was Umm Ahmed’s idea to adopt a child. The couple had no children, and she heard Islamic State was selling orphans in the town of Tel Afar, some 40 km (25 miles) to the west.

“My objective was to win favor (with God),” said Umm Ahmed, only her eyes showing in a gap in her black veil. “To be honest, I wanted to teach him my religion, Islam.”

Her husband, a government employee, was against the idea but could not dissuade his wife, who went alone to get the boy from an orphanage run by the militants, paying for him with her earnings as a teacher.

Although the boy cried and did not want to go with her, she coaxed him, saying: “Come, you will be my child. We will live together and I will buy you everything.”

REALLY SMART

Gradually he grew accustomed to his adoptive parents, who taught him Arabic instead of the Kurdish dialect spoken by Yazidis. They told people he was a nephew they had taken in and enrolled him at the local school under the name Ahmed Shareef, but mostly he was kept indoors.

“He was really smart. I taught him to pray and perform ablutions. Do you know how much of the Koran he memorized?” Umm Ahmed said.

They did not want him to forget who he was and encouraged him to speak about life in his village of Hardan. But she said: “I always warned him not to tell anyone (he was Yazidi).”

Islamic State imposed a radical version of Islam in Mosul after establishing the city as its de facto capital: banning cigarettes, televisions and radios, and forcing men to grow beards and women to cover from head to toe.

They branded the Yazidis, whose beliefs combine elements of several ancient Middle Eastern religions, as devil-worshipers.

Sometimes Ayman asked about the rest of his family but Umm and Abu Ahmed did not know what happened to them except for a sister in her mid-teens who was taken as a slave by a militant from Tel Afar. The militant brought the sister to visit several times but her current fate is unknown.

The whereabouts of a half-brother who was sold at the orphanage before Ayman are also not known.

As the U.S.-backed campaign to drive Islamic State out of Mosul gathered pace and the Iraqi army’s ninth division reached Rashidiya, things began to unravel for Umm and Abu Ahmed.

On entering the village, a commander received a tip that a Yazidi boy was being held there and dispatched soldiers to retrieve him. The couple had no choice but to give him up.

A video clip of the moment they were parted shows Ayman clinging to Umm Ahmed and crying.

In the clip, provided to Reuters by an aid group embedded with the army, she pleads with the soldiers who came to get the boy. “Leave him with me a bit,” she says, then tries to comfort him in spite of her own distress: “You will go and see your mother now… and when you grow up you will come and see me”.

BACK FROM THE DEAD

Ayman’s parents and most other relatives are still missing, but his grandmother and uncle live on the edge of one of several camps to which the Yazidi community has been displaced en masse, about 50 km (30 miles) away from Rashidiya.

Samir Rasho Khalaf thought his nephew had been killed until he saw a post on Facebook on Jan. 28 that a Yazidi child named Ayman Ameen Barakat had been found.

“I was stunned,” said Khalaf. “It’s a miracle: he came back from the dead.”

That same night, they were reunited. In a video of the reunion shown to Reuters by the soldiers who handed Ayman over, his grandmother strikes herself on the head repeatedly when she sees the boy, picking him up and wailing in disbelief.

“We all cried,” Major Wathiq Amjad Naathar, the army official who oversaw the handover, told Reuters.

That night, Ayman was beside himself and begged to be returned to Umm Ahmed, Khalaf said.

But on a visit by a Reuters reporter and TV crew this week, he appeared happy and calm, if bashful about all the attention.

Asked if he had been happy with his adoptive parents, he said yes, and asked if he was happy to be back with his real family, he said yes too.

Khalaf said he was pleased that Umm and Abu Ahmed kept Ayman safe and healthy, and he was grateful that, unlike so many other Yazidi boys abducted by Islamic State, he was not forced to train with weapons or fight.

But he was angry the couple did not try harder to find his family to say he was alive and well, and has refused to allow them to talk to Ayman, even though they called once.

“We don’t mention them (his adoptive parents) so he will forget them,” he said.

Umm Ahmed said he will never forget them, however, just as they will not forget him.

“I expect he will return,” she said.

(Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

Bomb classes and gun counts: trauma of Mosul children under Islamic State

schoolchildren heading for schools after registering and receiving school bags

By Girish Gupta

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – Schools in the east of the Iraqi city of Mosul are seeking to return to a semblance of normality after two years under Islamic State rule when they were either shuttered or forced to teach a martial curriculum that included lessons in bombmaking.

Around 40,000 students – most of whom have been kept at home by their parents since the militants captured Mosul in 2014 – will attend around 70 schools in the coming weeks after the buildings have been checked for unexploded bombs.

U.S.-backed Iraqi forces have retaken most eastern districts of the city and are preparing to push into the western part of Mosul, the largest city held by Islamic State across its self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

Teachers and parents told Reuters about the jihadists’ brand of education received by those children who have attended school over the past two years, including many children of militants. This included chemistry lessons on bombmaking and maths classes devoted to tallying up weapons caches, they said.

“In math, my six-year-old son was counting rifles. In other classes, he was being taught about suicide bombing,” said Mishwan Yunis, a 41-year-old water ministry worker whose son attends Kufa Boys’ School.

“He lost two very important years of his life. He should have been in the third grade; now he goes back to first.”

The northern city is coming back to life with markets and shops reopening and people selling once-prohibited goods such as cigarettes openly on the streets yet the damage of battle is everywhere – and fighting rages just a few kilometers away.

At Kufa Boys’ School, children run around the concrete yard wearing new bright blue school bags provided by UNICEF, in the shadow of neighboring buildings reduced to rubble.

One schoolyard in the area has been turned into a cemetery covered with dozens of freshly dug graves.

Yet a return to normality will not be easy for children, who bears the scars of living in the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Iraq and the bitter battle for the city since late last year when Iraqi forces launched the biggest ground operation in the country since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003.

They could face psychological hurdles, as might their teachers, many of who told Reuters they had been threatened with being hung from their schools’ walls if they did not continue teaching under Islamic State.

“Our role is bigger now than it was two or three years ago because you need to deal with the children’s psychological state before you can teach them,” said Omar Khudor Ali, headteacher of nearby Badayel Boys’ School.

“For us to do this we need better coordination between the teachers themselves and the entire education system.”

“I need to make them forget Islamic State and be free again,” said a teacher at the adjacent Badayel Girls’ School who asked that her name not be revealed for fear of retaliation by Islamic State, fighting Iraqi forces across a nearby river.

(Editing by Pravin Char)

Boko Haram attacks destroy farm communities, bring famine risk

Nigerian Women and Children waiting at a nutrition clinic

By Alexis Akwagyiram

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) – Fati Adamu has not seen three of her six children nor her husband since Boko Haram militants attacked her hometown in northeast Nigeria in an hail of bullets.

Two years on, she is among thousands of refugees at the Bakassi camp in Maiduguri, the city worst hit by a seven-year-old insurgency that has forced more than two million people to flee their homes.

The United Nations says 400,000 children are now at risk from a famine in the northeastern states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe – 75,000 of whom could die from hunger within the next few months.

A push against the jihadists by the Nigerian army and soldiers from neighboring countries has enabled troops to enter remote parts of the northeast in the last few months, revealing tens of thousands on the brink of starvation and countless families torn apart.

“I don’t know if they are dead or alive,” Adamu, 35, said of her missing relatives.

There is a renewed threat of Boko Haram attacks. The start of the dry season has seen a surge in suicide bombings, some of which have targeted camps, including one at Bakassi in October which killed five people.

The World Food Programme said it provides food aid to 450,000 people in Borno and Yobe. Some 200,000 of them receive 17,000 naira each month to buy food, soon to rise to 23,000.

At least 15 camps, mostly on the outskirts of Maiduguru, the Borno state capital, are home to thousands of people unable to return home and surviving on food rations.

At one known as New Prison, women and children visibly outnumber men, many of whom were killed by Boko Haram or are missing.

One man — 45-year-old Bukaralhaji Bukar, who has eight children from his two wives — said the food he buys with the monthly stipend finishes within two weeks.

“We are suffering. It is not enough,” said Bukar, who begs on the street to make money.

In the center of Maiduguri, life seems to be returning to normal. Food markets are bustling but soldiers in pick-ups clutching rifles are reminders of the need for vigilance.

MALNOURISHED CHILDREN

In a ward in Molai district near the Bakassi camp, the air is filled with the sound of crying babies and the gurgle of those who lack the energy to cry. Some, whose skin clings tightly to their bones, are silent – too weary to even raise their heads.

“Many of them are malnourished, which is already bad enough, but they also develop things like malaria which further worsens their illnesses because they can’t eat and start vomiting,” said Dr Iasac Bot, who works at the unit overseen by the charity Save the Children.

Children have conditions ranging from diarrhea and pneumonia to bacterial infections and skin infections.

Hauwa Malu, 20, fled with her husband and their two-week-old daughter, Miriam, from her village in Jere after Boko Haram militants burned the farming community to the ground and took their cattle.

Miriam, now aged 10 months, has suffered from fevers, a persistent cough and is malnourished. Her mother said they have been left without a home or livelihood.

Tim Vaessen of the Food and Agriculture Organization said a failure to restore their ability to farm would in the long term mean displaced people would depend on expensive food aid.

“They would remain in these camps, they would become easy targets for other armed groups and they might have to migrate again – even up to Europe,” he said.

(Reporting by Alexis Akwagyiram, Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Living like ghosts in the ruins of Syria’s besieged Aleppo

still taken from video on social media showing aleppo's emptiness

By John Davison and Suleiman Al-Khalidi

BEIRUT/AMMAN (Reuters) – Even if it were somehow possible to escape eastern Aleppo, Abdullah Shiyani, a 10-year-old boy who dreams of being a doctor, says he wouldn’t leave. It would mean leaving behind too many people who need help.

“We have a lot of injured people here,” he told Reuters over the Internet. “Maybe we can help them.”

His father was a fighter, killed on the frontline. So he lives with his five siblings in a neighborhood that is almost an empty ghost town. They survive off money from a charity, buying potatoes, parsley and onions when they can. Three weeks ago they even had some meat.

Three of his friends were killed in a rocket attack a few months ago. With school long-since closed, he and his other friends spend their days racing through the empty streets, kicking a ball or playing a game called “guns and knives”.

They duck into buildings when the planes fly overhead, he says, because “we know about the machine guns firing from the planes”.

Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city before civil war uprooted half of the country’s population and killed hundreds of thousands of people, is now the conflict’s biggest prize. Opposition-held areas are now under total siege and heavy bombardment as President Bashar al-Assad’s government attempts to deal a death blow to a five year rebellion.

The city has been divided into rebel and government-held zones for years. But recent months have seen government troops, backed by Russian air strikes and Shi’ite fighters from Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, close in on the rebel zone, where a quarter of a million people remain trapped.

Civilians reached by Reuters over the Internet and telephone tell of a bleak existence amid the ruins — of shortages of food, water and electricity, and incessant fear for their own lives and their loved ones.

“Every day there are about three to four (air) raids close to our house,” said 33-year-old mother-of-one Um Fahd, whose husband, brother and father have all been killed. “Our neighbor’s house was shelled and destroyed. A lot of people have died but we’re still here, thank God.”

She and her son survive on an allowance of $50 a month from a charity, barely enough for food.

“It’s not enough, but we’re grateful for whatever we get,” she said.

In the home she shares with her son, her sister and her sister’s three children, the entire family crams into the sturdiest room in the house whenever they hear warplanes, in the hope it will shield them from bombing.

“When the kids hear the sound of plane, they immediately know that they should go to that room,” she said.

Another woman, Um Ahmed, described how she and her husband careered through gunfire and shelling to flee during a brief window when the siege was broken. When it was reimposed, her two sons and their families remained trapped inside. Her voice trembled as she described her own escape under gunfire.

“I hesitated about leaving. I didn’t want to leave them behind. I haven’t been able to sleep at night, I’m so scared for them, because of the bombardments,” she said.

BROKEN FAMILIES

Aleppo has been one of the Middle East’s great cities for centuries. Its picturesque old center of covered spice markets has long since been reduced to rubble by street fighting. The crisis dramatically intensified earlier this year, when the government side captured territory north of the city, severing a vital supply route to Turkey.

A complete blockade of the rebel-held eastern sector was imposed in July, when pro-government forces severed the last road in. A rebel counter attack, heavily supported by Sunni Muslim jihadist groups, broke the siege in August, but government forces reimposed it in the last few days.

The government-held west of Aleppo holds more people and has also faced increasingly heavy insurgent shelling. But the destruction in the rebel-held east, targeted in daily air strikes, has been far more extensive.

The west came close to being encircled itself during fighting last month as rebels severed the only road in. The advancing government forces secured that route on Friday.

The devastation, death and displacement have left some neighborhoods of the besieged east sparsely populated, residents said. There is little work and no school. Most people spend their days trying to secure enough food to survive, and taking cover when the bombs fall. The children grow up fast.

The director of the al-Quds hospital in eastern Aleppo, Dr Hamza al-Khatib, said that during a recent suspected chlorine gas attack, children young enough to remember little other than war appeared to know instinctively how to react.

“I was shocked how five- or six-year-old children were holding oxygen masks alone, without help – like they were grown men who understood that this was the way to relieve their suffering,” he said.

Rescue workers accused the government of carrying out the Sept. 6 chlorine attack. Damascus denied involvement, saying “terror groups” were behind such attacks. The United Nations has blamed the government for previous attacks using chlorine gas.

When people die, relatives take the kids.

“My wife is looking after the five children my son left behind, and I’m helping her,” said 65-year-old Eid al-Ibrahim, whose eldest son was killed in an air strike.

People sometimes have to fight for their food.

“In our neighborhood they sell bags of five bread loaves … organized by the neighborhood council,” Ibrahim said, describing “a lot of crowding and fighting.”

Brita Hagi Hassan, president of the city council for opposition-held Aleppo, said prices had gone up by 10 times due to shortages induced by the siege. He said around 15 to 20 percent of eastern Aleppo’s residents left during the time the siege was lifted.

Many now eat little but lentils and cracked wheat. Electricity from motor generators is available only for three to six hours a day and damage to power facilities has long left eastern Aleppo with no running water.

Opposition-held neighborhoods have long suffered air strikes and attacks with barrel bombs — drums packed with explosives and shrapnel dropped from the air — from the government side.

The United Nations’ Commission of Inquiry on Syria has condemned the bombing of medical facilities in rebel-held districts, which it said were “explicitly targeted for destruction or assassination” of staff.

Damascus denies targeting civilians. A Syrian military source said the aim is to stop rebel shelling of western Aleppo and to encircle the militants in the east.

(Reporting by John Davison and Suleiman al-Khalidi; additional reporting by Tom Perry; editing by Tom Perry and Peter Graff)

Items from sailboat of missing family found off Florida coast

By Laila Kearney

(Reuters) – Crews searching waters off the Florida coast have found life vests and other items belonging to a man and his teenage children, who were reported missing after setting off on a sailboat three days ago, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Wednesday.

Ace Kimberly, 45, two sons aged 13 and 15, a 17-year-old daughter and their 29-foot-sailboat (9-meter) have not been located, Coast Guard Captain Gregory Case told reporters.

The Kimberly family was last seen on Sunday morning, when they set sail from Sarasota, Florida, and were headed to Fort Myers.

Later that day, Ace Kimberly phoned his brother from the boat and told him he was struggling with rough seas and thunderstorms off Englewood, a community about 30 miles south of Sarasota, Case said.

“That was the last that he heard from him,” Case said.

The family, who had lived on the vessel for about a year, was traveling to Fort Myers to have the boat repaired, the Coast Guard said.

At first light on Wednesday, the Coast Guard sent an HC-130 Hercules rescue aircrew to resume its search for the missing family.

The debris field spotted midday 33 miles offshore included six life vests, a basketball, propane tank, tennis shoes and several water bottles, which Kimberly’s brother identified as belonging to his relatives.

The brother said the group might have had an additional life vest and two kayaks that were not spotted by search crews, which has heartened searchers attempting to find the family alive, Case said.

“We’re always hopeful,” he said.

The search, which has also involved several state and local maritime emergency responders, will continue throughout the day.

(Reporting by Laila Kearney; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

Search resumes off Florida for missing family on sailboat

(Reuters) – Search crews were scouring the waters off the Florida coast early on Wednesday for a man and his three teenage children who were reported missing after setting off on a 29-foot-sailboat (9-meter) three days ago, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

The family, including the father, two boys aged 13 and 15 and a 17-year-old girl, were last seen on Sunday morning, when they set sail from Sarasota, Florida, and were headed to Fort Myers, the Coast Guard said in a statement.

Later that day, the father phoned his brother from the boat and told him he was struggling with six-foot-waves and “attempting to survive with his children” offshore of Englewood, a community about 30 miles south of Sarasota, the Coast Guard said.

The family, who was not named, were traveling to Fort Myers to have the boat repaired, the Coast Guard said.

At first light on Wednesday, the Coast Guard sent an HC-130 Hercules rescue aircrew to resume its search for the missing family, it said on Twitter.

Several state and local maritime emergency responders have also been involved in the search.

(Reporting by Laila Kearney; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

Congress eyes $1 billion to aid at-risk families

Neonatal Therapeutic Unit at Cabell Huntington Hospital

By Duff Wilson and John Shiffman

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Key members of the U.S. Congress said Friday they had reached a compromise to shift more than $1 billion to try to keep struggling families together, including those with babies born dependant on opioids.

The proposal is driven in part by an opioid crisis that threatens thousands of families. The bill would allow mental health, substance abuse and parenting assistance whenever a child is deemed at “imminent risk” of entering foster care. The measure also offers support for relatives who unexpectedly assume responsibility for a child when a parent cannot.

Under current law, such funds may only be spent after a child enters foster care. A spokesman for the Child Welfare League of America, John Sciamanna, called the proposed change “a landmark…, potentially historic.”

The legislation involves more than $1 billion over 10 years. Related opioid bills have not included funding.

“This bill would make a historic shift in child welfare funding by offering a way for moms and dads to get help and treatment rather than pitching in only after children are removed from home,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.

The bill is a compromise between four powerful members of Congress: Wyden; the Senate Finance committee’s Republican chair, Orrin Hatch of Utah; the Republican chair of the House Ways & Means Committee, Kevin Brady of Texas; and the ranking Democrat on Ways & Means, Sander Levin of Michigan.

The plan offers “bipartisan solutions for families and children affected by the opioid addiction crisis,” Hatch said in a statement.

In December, a Reuters investigation revealed that at least 110 babies had died since 2010 after being born opioid-dependent and sent home with parents ill-prepared to care for them. No more than nine of the 50 U.S. states followed a federal law requiring them to help those newborns, the news agency found.

In response to the Reuters series, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services asked all states to report by June 30 whether and how they are following the existing law, known as the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. In May, the House passed legislation to improve safety planning for children born dependent on opioid drugs.

Reanne Pederson of Devils Lake, N.D., one of the women portrayed in the Reuters series who accidentally smothered her newborn in bed while on drugs, said she was happy to hear about new funding possibilities.

“It’s important to me that moms who are struggling with addiction get help,” she said.

(Editing by Ronnie Greene)

Venezuela economic crisis means fewer meals, more starch

By Carlos Garcia Rawlins and Alexandra Valencia

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s soaring prices and chronic shortages have left 65-year-old homemaker Alida Gonzalez struggling to put meals on the table.

She and her four family members in the Caracas slum of Petare now routinely skip one meal per day and increasingly rely on starches to make up for proteins that are too expensive or simply unavailable.

“With the money we used to spend on breakfast, lunch and dinner, we can now buy only breakfast, and not a very good one,” said Gonzalez in her home, which on a recent day contained just half a kilo of chicken (about a pound), four plantains, some cooking oil, a small packet of rice, and a mango.

The family did not know when they would be able to buy more.

Recession and a dysfunctional state-run economy are forcing many in the South American OPEC country of 30 million to reduce consumption and eat less-balanced meals.

In a recent survey by researchers from three major universities often critical of the government, 87 percent of the respondents said their income was insufficient to purchase food.

The study of nearly 1,500 families found rising percentages of carbohydrates in diets, and found that 12 percent of those interviewed do not eat three meals a day.

Government supporters have long pointed proudly to the improvement in eating under late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, who used oil income to subsidize food for the poor during his 14-year rule and won United Nations plaudits for it.

But President Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s successor, has faced a collapse in the price of oil, which provides almost all foreign income. He further has blamed an opposition-led “economic war,” though critics deride that as an excuse.

Either way, Venezuelans are tired and cross.

A minimum wage is now only around 20 percent of the cost of feeding a family of five, according to one monitoring group. Lines snake around state supermarkets from before dawn.

“You have to get into these never ending lines – all day, five in the morning until three in the afternoon – to see if you get a couple of little bags of flour or some butter,” said taxi driver Jhonny Mendez, 58.

“It makes a person want to cry.”

Natalia Guerra, 45, lives in a small home in Petare with eight relatives, only one of whom has a significant salary.

She remembers buying milk for her own kids but now cannot find any for her grandchildren. “We’re a big family, and it’s constantly getting harder for us to eat,” she said.

(Writing by Brian Ellsworth; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne, Toni Reinhold)

Food Banks Struggling to Keep Up with Demand

Food banks across the country are facing an increase in families in need, forcing some charities to reduce the amount of food that can be given to each family.

Feeding America, America’s biggest food bank network, says that they will give away around 4 billion pounds of food this year, more than double the amount they provided to people in need a decade ago.

“We get lines of people every day, starting at 6:30 in the morning,” said Sheila Moore, who oversees food distribution at The Storehouse, Albuquerque, New Mexico’s largest food pantry.

Economists say the increased demand is surprising because of the increase in employment figures but many of the people who found jobs are only working part-time or for low wages, and are unable to feed their families with the costs of housing. Many others who have struggled to find jobs have stopped looking for work.

“I know what people go through,” Peggy Bragg, 56, of Des Moines said. “You have to choose between food and bills.” Bragg has been out of work for months.

A Fort Smith, Arkansas food bank does monthly food giveaways at a local park and draws around 1,000 families.

“When people are willing to stand in 100 degree weather for hours, that tells you something,” said Ken Kupchick, the food bank’s marketing director.

FBI Issues Alert: Middle Eastern Men Harassing Military Families

The FBI has issued an alert to officials in Colorado and Wyoming over a group of Middle Eastern men who have been harassing military families in the region.

Areas specifically mentioned by the FBI alert include Greeley, Colorado and Cheyenne, Wyoming.

One incident had two Middle Eastern men approaching a woman outside her home. The men stated they knew she was the wife of a U.S. interrogator. The men laughed when she denied the claim and then the men entered a dark-colored sedan that contained two other Middle Eastern men.

Other incidents have the men attempting to gain information.

“On numerous occasions family members of military personnel were confronted by Middle Eastern males in front of their homes,” the FBI alert reads. “The males have attempted to obtain personal information about the military men’s family members through intimidation.”

“The family members have reported feeling scared,” it added.

ISIS has stated that they intend to strike military members in their homes and last March published a list of addresses they claimed belonged to U.S. military members.

The alert also says the FBI cannot confirm if the incidents involve the same men.

Sign up for Jim Bakker Show