‘I am Nazarene’

Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State group) militants appear to have killed 3 Christian captives in Syria.

The 3 men wore orange jumpsuits. They identified themselves as Christians and then were shot. According to Christian Today, the video shows all three saying: “I am Nazarene.”

After the execution, three other captives are seen appealing for the payment of their ransoms, which amount to 50,000-100,000 dollars per person.

Caption of the video released by Daesh.

The victims were captured in February when Daesh overran a series of Assyrian settlements on the Khabur river in north-east Syria – villages that were populated in the early 20th century by Assyrian Christians fleeing Turkish genocide, The Guardian informed.

The Assyrian Human Rights Network said the three men were killed two weeks ago during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, but the video of the execution surfaced only in October.

There are at least 180 other captives held by Daesh. Most of them were capture in February this year after a three-day assault on a chain of 10 Syrian villages, the International Business Times reported. 

“SYSTEMATIC ETHNO-RELIGIOUS CLEANSING”

After the video was released, Human Rights group A Demand For Action posted a statement on Facebook: “We condemn this latest act of barbarism in the strongest possible terms. The systematic ethno-religious cleansing of Assyrian/Syriac/Chaldeans continues. They are helpless. They are children. They are women.”

“They are somebody's father and brother. We plea and beg of the international community to intervene immediately. We have been driven out of our ancestral lands. We have been killed and crucified. The international community must act now to save lives of others kidnapped.”