The Jim Bakker Show

New York man gets 13 years prison for trying to join al Qaeda

New York high school senior trying to join al Qaeda

By Nate Raymond

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A New York man was sentenced on Tuesday to 13 years in prison for trying to join the Islamic militant group al Qaeda when he was a high school senior.

Justin Kaliebe, now 22, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Denis Hurley in Central Islip, New York, after pleading guilty in February 2013 to having attempted to provide material support to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Kaliebe had been arrested a month earlier at John F. Kennedy International Airport, where prosecutors said he planned to board a flight to Muscat, Oman, as part of his plot to eventually travel to Yemen.

The defendant was also sentenced to 20 years of supervised release.

“I am disappointed and feel that a lesser sentence was warranted,” Kaliebe’s lawyer Anthony LaPinta said in an email.

“Justin is a harmless young man who had many psychological, medical and personal issues that contributed to his criminal conduct,” LaPinta continued. “Justin will make the best of his time in prison. I am certain that he will emerge as a rehabilitated, productive and respected member of society.”

Federal authorities have estimated that 80 percent of Americans linked to activities supporting militant Islamic movements have radicalized themselves with information from the internet.

Prosecutors said Kaliebe, a resident of Babylon, New York, began his plot in 2011, and told an undercover law enforcement operative the following year that he was “doing the J word,” or violent “jihad.”

In June 2012, Kaliebe was recorded as saying that upon arriving in Yemen, he expected to fight “those who are fighting against the Sharia of Allah,” be it the Yemeni army or U.S. forces, prosecutors said.

Kaliebe received support from Marcos Alonso Zea, another Long Island resident who according to prosecutors attempted to fly to Yemen in January 2012 but was intercepted by British customs officials and returned to the United States.

Zea, 28, was arrested in October 2013 and sentenced in April 2015 to 25 years in prison, after pleading guilty to attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in New York; Additional reporting by Jonathan Stempel; Editing by Tom Brown)

Arizona man faces trial for helping college student join Islamic State

By Nate Raymond

NEW YORK (Reuters) – An Arizona man is set to face trial on charges that he provided support to Islamic State by helping a New York City college student travel to Syria, where he died fighting for the militant group.

Opening statements were expected on Tuesday in Manhattan federal court in the case of Ahmed Mohammed El Gammal, 44, who was arrested in 2015 and charged with providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization.

El Gammal, who has pleaded not guilty, is one of more than 100 people to face U.S. charges since 2014 in cases related to the Islamic State militant group, which controls parts of Iraq and Syria.

Prosecutors said the case stemmed from El Gammal’s interactions with Samy Mohammed El-Goarany, a U.S. citizen.

By 2014, El-Goarany, then 24, had begun expressing increased interest in militant forms of Islam, prosecutors said. They said he first contacted El Gammal in August of that year after learning of online comments he posted supporting Islamic State.

El Gammal later traveled to New York and met El-Goarany, who according to a LinkedIn profile attended Baruch College in Manhattan from 2009 to 2013. He then arranged for El-Goarany to get in touch with an individual living in Turkey to help El-Goarany travel to join Islamic State, prosecutors said.

El-Goarany subsequently traveled from New York City to Istanbul in January 2015, and sometime in mid-February arrived in Syria, prosecutors said.

After learning of El Gammal’s arrest in 2015, El-Goarany posted a video on YouTube denying he had helped him and saying he “came here out of my own will,” prosecutors said.

In November 2015, an unidentified person via an instant messaging platform contacted one of El-Goarany’s relatives to report that he had been killed fighting in Syria, prosecutors said.

They said that person provided the relative with photographs of a note from El-Goarany that said “if you’re reading this then know that I’ve been killed in battle and am now with our Lord InshaAllah.”

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in New York; Editing by Alistair Bell)

Iraq forces advance in Mosul but civilian toll mounts

Iraqi forces inspect hospital in Mosul after clashes with ISIS

By John Davison and Stephen Kalin

BAGHDAD/ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) – Iraqi forces fought their way into more districts of Mosul but advances in the city’s southeast were being slowed by Islamic State’s use of civilians for cover, military officials said on Tuesday.

The United Nations said civilian casualties had streamed into nearby hospitals in the last two weeks as fighting intensified in the jihadist group’s last major stronghold in Iraq.

Advances by elite forces in the city’s east and northeast have picked up speed in a new push since the turn of the year, and U.S.-backed forces have for the first time reached the Tigris river, which bisects the city.

“They entered Hadba (district) today. There is a battle inside the city,” Lt-Colonel Abbas al-Azawi, a spokesman for the Iraqi army’s 16th division, said.

Seizing control of Hadba, a large district, would likely take more than a day, and Islamic State (IS) were deploying suicide bombers, he added.

Recapturing Mosul after more than two years of Islamic State rule would probably spell the end of the Iraqi side of the group’s self-declared caliphate, which spans areas of Iraq and Syria.

Forces in the city’s eastern and northeastern districts, and in particular the elite Counter Terrorism Service (CTS), have made rapid gains in past days.

Better defenses against militant car bombs and improved coordination among the advancing troops had helped put Islamic State on the back foot, U.S. and Iraqi military officers said.

“Every day the Iraqi Security Forces go forward and every day the enemy goes backward or underground,” U.S. Air Force Colonel John Dorrian, spokesman for the coalition, told reporters in Erbil in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region.

MILITANTS ‘HIDING IN MOSQUES’

But fighting in neighbourhoods in the southeast has been tougher.

“The challenge is that they (IS) are hiding among civilian families, that’s why our advances are slow and very cautious,” Lieutenant-Colonel Abdel Amir al-Mohammedawi, a spokesman for the rapid response units of Iraq’s federal police, told Reuters.

Mohammedawi said rapid response units and Iraqi army units had fought their way into the Palestine and Sumer districts in the last day, but that Islamic State fighters were firing at civilians trying to flee.

“The families, when they see Iraqi forces coming, flee from the areas controlled by Daesh (Islamic State) towards the Iraqi forces, holding up white flags, and Daesh bomb them with mortars and Molotov cocktails, and also shoot at them.

“Whenever they (IS) withdraw from a district, they shell it at random, and it’s heavy shelling,” he said.

Col. Dorrian said militant fighters were hiding in mosques, schools and hospitals, using civilians as human shields.

The United Nations’ humanitarian coordination office (OCHA) said nearly 700 people had been taken to hospitals in cities in Kurdish-controlled areas outside Mosul in the last week, and more than 817 had required hospital treatment a week earlier.

“Trauma casualties remain extremely high, particularly near frontline areas,” OCHA said.

The U.S.-backed operation to drive the ultra-hardline militants from Mosul began in October and has recaptured villages and towns surrounding the city, and most of Mosul’s eastern half.

(Additional reporting by Girish Gupta in Erbil; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Richard Lough)

Unclear whether truck attack in Israel inspired by Islamic State

Relatives and friends mourn the death of 4 Israeli soldiers

By Luke Baker

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel’s government has been quick to suggest a Palestinian who rammed a truck into a group of Israeli soldiers at the weekend was inspired by Islamic State, raising questions over how it came to that conclusion.

Hours after the attack on Sunday, which killed four soldiers and wounded 17, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the assailant showed all the signs of being a supporter of the ultra-hardline Sunni movement.

He did not give details but Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman cited parallels with Islamic State-inspired attacks on crowds using trucks in Germany and France last year.

“We saw it in France, we saw it in Berlin and unfortunately we saw it today in Jerusalem,” he said during a visit to the scene overlooking Jerusalem’s Old City.

In Israel, multiple voices were quick to point out the differences between Palestinian violence and that perpetrated by Islamic State. While Islam may inspire some Palestinian assailants, political motivations around Israel’s occupation and the long-running conflict remain the dominant factor.

“Palestinian attacks are overwhelmingly motivated by nationalism, not by religion,” said Orit Perlov, a social media expert and research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

“Israel is trying to generalize the phenomenon, saying everyone faces the same threat. But while the symptoms may be similar, the causes are completely different.”

In Europe there is sympathy and support for Israel and the deadly threats it faces, but also cautiousness about close comparisons.

Over the past 18 months, Netanyahu has repeatedly described a wave of Palestinian attacks on Israelis as part of the same violent Islamist campaign afflicting Europe, saying Israel, France and Germany are in the same boat, and that Israel’s frontline position needs to be better understood.

“They might have different names — ISIS, Boko Haram, Hamas, Al Shabab, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah — but all of them are driven by the same hatred and bloodthirsty fanaticism,” Netanyahu said in January last year. “We understand we are in a common battle for our values and a common battle for our future.”

Sunday’s statement was the clearest link Netanyahu had made between a Palestinian attacker and Islamic State, although he did not say the group planned it or that the assailant, who was shot dead at the scene, was an Islamic State operative.

Yossi Melman, an analyst writing in Ma’ariv newspaper, said there was little evidence to suggest the Palestinian attacker had drawn inspiration from Islamic State, pointing out that Palestinians carried out car-ramming attacks before ISIS.

“This is essentially a case of unaffiliated terrorists, young people … who do not belong to any organization and decide on their own, often on a whim and with no prior preparations, to commit a terror attack,” he said.

QUID PRO QUO?

Others said it made sense for Netanyahu to try to draw a direct link between the threats Israel faces and those in Europe, but that it was unlikely to convince policymakers.

“There are no signs that Europe as a whole will stop considering the occupation as the main cause for Palestinian terrorism,” said Ilan Jonas, chief executive of Prime Source, an Israeli political and security consultancy.

Europe is not about to “adopt Netanyahu’s line that this is part of a universal phenomenon that is totally unrelated to Israel’s policies in the West Bank,” he said.

As is common, Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza, praised Sunday’s attack. But the Palestinian Authority, which has limited self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, was more circumspect. Its security forces even carried out raids in some areas, supporting Israel’s clampdown.

Adnan al-Dmairi, spokesman of the Palestinian security services in the West Bank, dismissed any suggestion Islamic State had a foothold in the territory.

“There is no presence for ISIS as an organization in the West Bank,” he told Reuters, while acknowledging some people expressed support on Facebook or other social media. “There is nothing of such a name as ISIS in the Palestinian areas.”

Data tends to back that up. Figures collected by Israel’s security establishment show Palestinian support for ISIS declining, said Perlov of the INSS, with the level falling from 14 percent in 2014-15 to eight percent last year.

“The trend is downwards. Even if there was some low-level support for IS at the peak when it seized control of Mosul, that has dropped away,” said Perlov.

Some Israeli Arabs — no more than a couple of dozen, analysts say — have tried to go and join Islamic State in Syria or Iraq, but that number is a fraction of the Muslims that have gone from Britain, Belgium, France or the Netherlands.

For Europe, Israel’s generalization of the terrorism threat presents a problem, said Andrea Frontini, an analyst at the European Policy Centre, because it risks over-politicizing counter-terrorism cooperation.

On the one hand, Europe needs and wants closer cooperation with Israel when it comes to tackling rising security threats, she said. But Europe does not want to feel like it has soften its approach on other issues, such as the Middle East peace process and Israel’s occupation, in order to show solidarity.

(Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; Writing by Luke Baker)

Nigerian soldiers find Chibok girl kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) – Nigerian soldiers have found a schoolgirl who was one of more than 200 pupils kidnapped by Islamist militant group Boko Haram from their school in the northeastern town of Chibok in April 2014, an army spokesman said on Thursday.

The troops had found Rakiya Abubkar wandering around near Algarno, a former Boko Haram stronghold, the spokesman said. She had a six-month-old baby with her.

A total of 276 schoolgirls were abducted by Boko Haram from Chibok in 2014 in one of the most infamous actions of their insurgency. More than 20 were released in October in a deal brokered by the International Red Cross. Others have escaped or been rescued but about 200 are believed to be still in captivity.

Boko Haram has killed 15,000 people and displaced more than two million during a seven-year-old insurgency aimed at creating an Islamic caliphate in northeast Nigeria.

The group controlled an area about the size of Belgium in early 2015 but has been pushed out of most of that territory over the last year by Nigeria’s army and troops from neighbouring countries.

Last month, the army said it had seized a key Boko Haram camp in its last enclave in Nigeria in the vast Sambisa forest. The jihadists still stage suicide bombings in northeastern areas and in neighbouring Niger and Cameroon.

(Reporting by Lanre Ola, Alexis Akwagyiram and Ulf Laessing; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Dominic Evans)

U.S., European weapons used to commit war crimes in Iraq: Amnesty

ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) – Militias fighting alongside Iraqi troops against Islamic State are committing war crimes using weapons provided to the Iraqi military by the United States, Europe, Russia and Iran, Amnesty International said on Thursday.

The rights group said that the predominantly Shi’ite Muslim militias, known collective as the Hashid Shaabi, were using weapons from Iraqi military stockpiles to commit war crimes including enforced disappearances, torture and summary killings.

Hashid Shaabi rejected Amnesty’s accusation as “lies”.

Parliament voted for the Hashid to formally become part of Iraq’s armed forces in November but the session was boycotted by Sunni Muslim representatives, who worry the move will entrench Shi’ite majority rule as well as Iran’s regional influence.

Iraqi and Western officials have expressed serious concern about the government’s ability to bring the Shi’ite militias under greater control.

“International arms suppliers, including the USA, European countries, Russia and Iran, must wake up to the fact that all arms transfers to Iraq carry a real risk of ending up in the hands of militia groups with long histories of human rights violations,” Amnesty researcher Patrick Wilcken said.

States wishing to sell arms to Iraq should ensure strict measures to ensure weapons will not be used by militias to violate human rights, he added in a statement.

Hashid spokesman Ahmed al-Assadi denied Amnesty’s report.

“These lies falsify truths and contribute directly or indirectly to the continuation of struggles that the Iraqi people and the people of neighbouring countries suffer from,” he told a news conference aired by state television.

“This is very clear in this report when it is purposefully slandering an official government institution,” he added, calling for an inquiry into Amnesty’s sources.

Amnesty cited nearly 2-1/2 years of its own field research, including interviews with dozens of former detainees, witnesses, survivors, and relatives of those killed, detained or missing.

Its report focused on four powerful militia groups, most of which receive backing from Iran: the Badr Organisation, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, Kataib Hezbollah and Saraya al-Salam.

The Hashid deny having sectarian aims or committing widespread abuses. They say they saved the nation by pushing Islamic State back from Baghdad’s borders after the army crumbled before the jihadists’ lightning advance in 2014.

There have been few accusations of serious abuses by the Hashid since the start of a major offensive on Oct. 17 to retake the northern city of Mosul from Islamic State. Various Hashid groups have joined in that battle, and a top U.S. general told The Daily Beast last week they had been “remarkably disciplined”.

(Reporting by Girish Gupta and Saif Hameed; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Iraqi general says 70 percent of east Mosul retaken from Islamic State

By Stephen Kalin and Isabel Coles

ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) – Iraqi forces have retaken around 70 percent of eastern Mosul from Islamic State militants and expect to reach the river bisecting the city in the coming days, Iraq’s joint operations commander told Reuters.

Lieutenant General Talib Shaghati, who is also head of the elite counter-terrorism service (CTS) spearheading the campaign to retake the northern city, said the cooperation of residents was helping them advance against Islamic State.

In its 12th week, the offensive has gained momentum since Iraqi forces backed by a U.S.-led coalition renewed their push for the city a week ago, clearing several more eastern districts despite fierce resistance.

“Roughly 65-70 percent of the eastern side has been liberated,” Shaghati said in an interview late on Wednesday in the Kurdish capital of Erbil. “I think in the coming few days we will see the full liberation of the eastern side”.

The western half of the city remains under the full control of Islamic State, which is fighting to hold on to its largest urban stronghold with snipers and suicide car bombs numbering “in the hundreds” according to Shaghati.

The Mosul assault, involving a 100,000-strong ground force of Iraqi government troops, members of the autonomous Kurdish security forces and mainly Shi’ite militiamen, is the most complex battle in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

The commander of a U.S.-led coalition backing the Iraqi offensive told Reuters on Wednesday that increased momentum was due largely to better coordination among the army and security forces. He said the Iraqis had improved their ability to defend against Islamic State car bombs.

Although vastly outnumbered, the militants have used the urban terrain to their advantage, concealing car bombs in narrow alleys, posting snipers on tall buildings with civilians on lower floors and making tunnels and surface-level passageways between buildings. They have also embedded themselves among the local population.

HUMAN SHIELDS

The presence of large numbers of civilians on the battlefield has restricted Iraqi forces’ use of artillery but the cooperation of residents has also helped them target the militants.

“They give us information about the location of the terrorists, their movements and weapons that has helped us pursue them and arrest some and kill others,” Shaghati said.

In the run-up to the Mosul offensive, Iraqi officials expressed hope that residents would rise up against Islamic State, accelerating the group’s demise in the city. But mass executions seem to have discouraged widespread resistance.

An Iraqi victory in Mosul would probably spell the end for Islamic State’s self-styled caliphate, which leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared 2-1/2 years ago from Mosul’s main mosque after the militants overran the city.

But in recent days, the militants have displayed the tactics to which they are likely to resort if they lose the city, killing dozens with bombs in Baghdad and attacking security forces elsewhere.

An attack claimed by Islamic State killed six people on Thursday on the capital’s eastern outskirts.

CTS pushed into Mosul from the east in late October and made swift advances but regular army troops tasked with advancing from the north and south made slower progress and the operation stalled for several weeks.

The roughly 10,000 members of CTS, established a decade ago with support from the U.S. forces, are considered the best-trained and equipped fighters in Iraq.

Shaghati described the role of the international coalition, providing air support and advising Iraqi forces on the ground as “outstanding” and said Islamic State was crumbling under pressure.

“Daesh (Islamic State) devised many plans to obstruct and block us but they failed. We were able to surpass them and these areas were liberated with high speed,” Shaghati said.

“We have intelligence that (Islamic State) leaders and their families are fleeing outside Iraq.”

(Writing by Isabel Coles; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Germany detains Tunisian man linked to Berlin truck attacker

Police stand in front of the truck used in the Berlin Christmas Market Attack

BERLIN (Reuters) – German police have detained a 26-year-old Tunisian man over links with the perpetrator of an Islamist truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market that killed 12 people, a federal prosecutors’ spokeswoman said on Wednesday.

Police on Tuesday evening searched the living quarters of the man identified as Bilel A. after he was found to have had dinner with Anis Amri a day before Amri steered a truck through the market on Dec. 19, spokeswoman Frauke Koehler said.

“This contact person is a 26-year-old Tunisian. We are investigating him for possible participation in the attack,” she told reporters.

Amri, 24, also a Tunisian and failed asylum seeker, was killed in a shootout with Italian police on Dec. 23 after fleeing Germany and traveling through the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Islamic State militants claimed responsibility for the Berlin attack.

Koehler said the investigation had shown Amri met the second Tunisian man in a restaurant in central Berlin on the eve of the attack and that the two engaged in “very intense discussions”.

“That triggered the suspicion for us that the suspect, this 26-year-old Tunisian, was possibly involved in the act, or at the very least knew of the attack plans of Anis Amri,” she said.

Koehler said there was insufficient evidence at this point to charge the man with any role in the Christmas market carnage, though had been previously investigated on suspicion of planning a violent attack.

Officials were evaluating communications devices seized during the raid of the man’s accommodations in a Berlin refugee center, and in the course of a second raid the same evening at the flat of another man who had contact with Amri.

In a separate statement, the Berlin state prosecutor’s office said it had detained the 26-year-old Tunisian on Tuesday for suspected social benefit fraud in three German cities.

A spokesman for the Berlin prosecutor’s office said Bilel A. had used at least two aliases, Ahmad H. and Abu M., and also claimed to be Egyptian. He was believed to have arrived in Germany in 2014 or perhaps earlier.

Berlin prosecutors in 2015 investigated whether the man had acquired explosives for an attack but dropped the inquiry in June last year for lack of evidence.

Koehler said Amri stared into a surveillance camera at a subway station near the Berlin zoo shortly after the Christmas market attack, and raised his index finger in a gesture sometimes seen in Islamic State propaganda videos.

She said forensic evidence showed that the Polish driver from whom Amri hijacked the truck was fatally shot while sitting in the passenger seat of the vehicle. The gun Amri used was the one found next to his body by police in Milan, Italy, she added.

Belgian prosecutors said on Wednesday Amri made a two-hour stopover at the Brussels North station on Dec. 21 after entering Belgium on a train from Amsterdam, before heading onwards to France.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Michael Nienaber in Berlin, Alissa de Carbonnel in Brussels; editing by Mark Heinrich)

Trauma of Islamic State rule follows Iraqi women out of Mosul

By Stephen Kalin

KHAZIR, Iraq (Reuters) – One wrong word to an Islamic State fighter in Mosul last year was all it took to set in motion a harrowing chain of events for an Iraqi woman who became so traumatized that she trembled in fear even after escaping the group’s control.

The widowed mother was being vetted to receive a pension from the ultra-hardline Islamists a few months after they seized the northern city in 2014 and turned it into the Iraqi capital of their self-styled caliphate.

“I made the mistake of telling them my husband had been a victim of terrorism,” she said in an interview on Tuesday at a government-run camp in Khazir, east of Mosul. “One of them hit me and broke my teeth. Then they took me to a house and held me for three days.”

The jihadists locked her up in a filthy room with rats and bugs. She was blindfolded and her arms and legs were bound by chains as one of the men – or perhaps several, she couldn’t tell – raped her over and over again, she said.

Islamic State, which is putting up fierce resistance to a U.S.-backed offensive to retake Mosul, the group’s last major stronghold in Iraq, has been accused of massacre, enslavement and rape since it swept across large swathes of the country’s north and west in 2014.

There was no way of verifying her story, but it reflected others’ experiences coming to light as civilians from the most populous city ever controlled by the jihadists emerge from their grip and grapple with 2-1/2 years of suffering.

A 13-year-old girl who also spoke to Reuters on the condition of anonymity said her father had married her to a neighbor four years her senior who turned out to be with Islamic State.

The slender adolescent now clutching a pink sequined purse said he had threatened to kill her and permitted his brothers to sexually assault her.

After escaping Mosul a few weeks ago, she learned he had made it to a nearby camp and informed the authorities. They detained him, but the pair remain married.

The 37-year-old widow fled last month to Khazir camp, where she receives counseling from UNFPA, a United Nations agency focused on gender-based violence. She asked that her name be withheld for fear of retribution and donned a face veil that revealed only her eyes.

When Islamic State released her after the assault, the diminutive, round-faced woman returned home thinking her nightmare was over.

She sent her two younger children – now 9 and 11 – to stay with relatives in the nearby Kurdish city of Erbil and planned to join them as soon as she could save enough money to smuggle herself and her eldest son.

But a few weeks later she discovered she was pregnant with the child of one of her Islamic State tormentors. In addition to the trauma of being raped, she feared the stigma in Iraq’s conservative society of an unmarried woman giving birth. Within two months she had rushed into marriage with a man who had agreed to adopt the child as his own.

“DIE OF HUNGER OR GET MARRIED”

“They were forcing widows to get married. This was one of their rules: either die of hunger or get married,” said the woman, who occasionally wept and fidgeted with her hands underneath a loose-fitting garment.

Her new husband, though, also had a troubled past. An engineering student in his last year of university, he had been sentenced to death in connection with a crime of honor before Islamic State seized Mosul. In jail, he befriended jihadists who helped him escape when the group routed government forces in 2014.

Soon after the pair married, Islamic State gave the man an ultimatum: fight with us or we kill you. He yielded, and his new wife found herself back in the militants’ clutches.

When her family living outside Mosul learned that she was now married to an Islamic State member, they severed all connections with her. Her late husband’s brother took custody of her two young children and moved them to Baghdad, vowing never to let her see them again.

When Iraqi forces reached her neighborhood last month, she said, they detained her new husband to investigate his jihadist ties.

She took her eldest son with her to the camp but left the baby, now just over a year old, with her new husband’s second wife who remains in Mosul. His fate and that of hundreds or perhaps thousands of other children born to the jihadists remains unclear as the group loses much of its territory and its bid for statehood.

“They think this is the son of their father, they don’t know the truth,” the mother said of the second wife’s family. “The boy doesn’t look like me.”

She has resolved never to return to Mosul, even if Islamic State is eliminated. “I want to go somewhere far away where nobody knows me.”

Artist works to preserve Christian heritage in Hamas-run Gaza

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) – Only about 1,200 Christians remain in Gaza — only a tiny fraction of the population in a territory run by Hamas Islamists — but artist Naser Jeldha is doing what he can to preserve its Christian heritage through art.

In his studio in the heart of old Gaza, not far from a 5th century Orthodox church, Jeldha spends his days carving religious figurines, chiseling low-relief carvings of Biblical scenes and painting portraits of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and the saints.

“My message is about my religion,” said the gray-bearded 57-year-old, a member of the Greek Orthodox community.

“I want to make it visual, I want to make people see it, not only to be kept as texts in church.”

As he works, steel-rimmed spectacles perched on his nose, Jeldha listens to Byzantine prayer music that echoes softly around the studio, creating an atmosphere from another era.

The walls are covered in his pictures, with more laid out on the arms of chairs and sofas, and others propped on a 150-year-old Russian piano in the corner. As well as painting and sculpture, Jeldha plays the accordion, piano and guitar.

In the run up to Christmas – celebrated on Jan. 7 in the Orthodox church – Jeldha is busy making pieces as gifts for friends and relatives.

While he has been an artist for 35 years, he does not display his works or offer them for sale. Instead, he presents them as gifts at weddings or events on the Christian calendar. He does, however, have plans for a public showing soon.

In the next two weeks, he is also hoping he will be one of about 800 Christians granted a permit by Israel to leave Gaza and travel to Bethlehem, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, to attend prayer services in Jesus’s birthplace.

“We have applied for permits and if we get them I intend to travel with my family,” said Jeldha, who is determined to remain in Gaza despite the departure of many Christians over the last decade in the face of rising economic hardship.

While Gaza’s Christians generally enjoy good relations with their Muslim neighbors, there have been isolated attacks by hardline Salafist groups on Christian tombs and symbols.

Hamas, the Islamist movement that has ruled Gaza since 2006, is keen to ensure the Christian community feels safe and protected. Its leaders occasionally visit the heads of the three Gaza churches to build stronger relations.

Jeldha acknowledged that the economy was suffering, with the blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt, a move to pressure Hamas, limiting trade, driving up costs and causing despair.

Despite that, Jeldha, whose white front door is adorned with a small cross painted in blue, said he would never leave.

“I have lived in this neighborhood for 54 years. I have brotherly and wonderful relations with Muslims,” said the father of four. “Gaza is beautiful and I will not leave it…I do not feel I am a stranger here.”

(Writing by Nidal Almughrabi, Editing by Luke Baker and Angus MacSwan)

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