ISIS Murders Teenage Boy for Being 'Gay' in Syria | Advocate.com

Militants with the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria have reportedly thrown a 15-year-old boy from the roof of a building in the northern Syrian city of Deir ez-Sor, reports ARA News.

Friday’s execution is the latest report of deadly violence targeting those believed to be (or accused of being) gay in the Middle Eastern regions controlled by the the terrorist group also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh.

As with other antigay executions, the young man’s murder was conducted in front of a large crowd, who watched as militants bound and blindfolded the 15-year-old, before throwing him off the roof to his death. In similar incidents over the past year, victims who have survived the fall have been stoned to death by militants and residents waiting on the ground. Other executions have contained beheadings of people thought to be LGBT or otherwise at odds with the group's radical interpretation of Islam. 

ISIS Murders Teenage Boy for Being 'Gay' in Syria | Advocate.com

Gay Men Share Horrific Stories of Life Under ISIS: 'In My Society, Being Gay Means Death' - WATCH - Towleroad

Sean Mandell does a superb job of detailing the "dire conditions" faced by LGBTQ individuals in "ISIS-controlled territory".  Though dated from August, the situation has not changed.

For months, we’ve reported on the dire conditions faced by gay men living in ISIS-controlled territory. The Islamic State has claimed to have murdered more than 30 gay men since it rose to power. While many have been unable to confirm these figures for various reasons, not least of which being that ISIS often labels any dissident as a homosexual, two gay men who lived in ISIS-controlled areas are speaking out for the first time about the brutality and fear they and others faced living under the draconian regime.

As ITV News reports, Syrian refugee Subhi Nahas told of the fear that ruled him living in an environment so hostile even his family proved a threat to his safety,,,
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While Adnan remains in Iraq, Nahas has successfully made it to the U.S. and now works with the Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration, an organization specifically aiming to help LGBT refugees.


U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power underscored the importance of addressing LGBT rights globally, making note that yesterday’s meeting of the Security Council was the first time the committee had discussed LGBT issues. Via The Independent:

“It is impossible not to take up the struggle for their rights as our own as we have other great human rights struggles,” she is reported to have told the meeting. “Today, we take a small but important step in assuming that work. It must not be our last step.”

Gay Men Share Horrific Stories of Life Under ISIS: 'In My Society, Being Gay Means Death' - WATCH - Towleroad

Syrian gang rape victim who fled to Germany is stabbed to death 'in honour killing' | Daily Mail Online

A woman whose family branded her 'unclean' after she was gang-raped in her Syrian homeland has been found murdered in Germany – allegedly on the orders of her own mother.

Police believe the victim, named only as Rokstan M, 20, was stabbed to death by her father and brothers in the twisted logic that she had brought disgrace on her family through the sex attack.

Shortly before she was found dead in an allotment garden in the eastern German city of Dessau, she apparently had a premonition of her fate.

Writing on her WhatsApp profile, she said: 'I am awaiting death. But I am too young to die.'

Syrian gang rape victim who fled to Germany is stabbed to death 'in honour killing' | Daily Mail Online

The true motives behind Islamic State’s use of sexual slavery

Another look at ISIS's "theology of rape",,,

So what about Islamic State’s sexual enslavement of non-Muslims, particularly Yazidi girls? Given the group’s policy coordination at the highest levels, are these practices being carried out as an intentional repudiation of an international “year of the woman” argument? Is the group seeking to refute efforts to lionize Malala Yousufzai or champion women’s emancipation even in the most traditional of villages?

Islamic State is attuned to the interests of observant Muslim boys and girls around the world. As it works to recruit young adults and teenagers throughout the West, newspapers have reported, the group has demonstrated a remarkable sense of the languages and challenges of modernity.

So there may also be an official sense among Islamic State leaders that the practice of sexually enslaving Yazidi women would likely disgust and outrage the West and other Muslims. Yet it also challenges modern Muslim youth to think about male sexual gratification in unambiguous warrior terms, and to view Islamic State’s stark society as morally complete in its treatment of others — a society which requires that they must give up “Western” values to join.

The social context may be just as important for understanding this new policy of sexual enslavement. One thing learned from the study of the small religious movements that have sprung up in the West over the past few centuries is the systematic restructuring of sexual relations that leaders have often demanded at an early point in the movement. This may involve group celibacy or polygamy, the exclusive sexual rights of the leader, or free sexual relations. It can often mean dissolution of prior marriages.

The true motives behind Islamic State’s use of sexual slavery

ISIL Persecutes LGBT People, Experts Tell UN | Al Jazeera America

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has claimed responsibility for executing at least 30 people accused of sodomy, the head of an international gay rights organization told the U.N. Security Council on Monday.

The executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Jessica Stern, said that courts established by ISIL claim to have punished sodomy with stoning, firing squads, beheadings and by pushing people from tall buildings.

"In addition to men perceived as gay, trans-identified people and lesbians are among those who have been raped and killed," Stern said.

Stern, who addressed the issue at the council’s first-ever meeting on LGBT rights, says fear of the group, which controls large swathes of Iraq and Syria, has fueled violence by other armed groups and "private actors" against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender individuals.

"It's about time, 70 years after the creation of the U.N., that the fate of LGBT persons who fear for their lives around the world is taking center stage," said U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power, who organized the meeting on violence and discrimination against LGBT people with Chile’s U.N. envoy, Cristian Barros Melet.

Stern called for specific strategies to combat LGBT attacks, including U.N. action to relocate those most in need and bringing the gay community into broader human rights and humanitarian initiatives.

ISIL Persecutes LGBT People, Experts Tell UN | Al Jazeera America

ISIS Blows Up Ancient Temple at Syria’s Palmyra Ruins - The New York Times

Militants from the Islamic State set off explosions at a temple in the ancient ruins of Palmyra in Syria, activists and government officials said on Sunday, continuing a pattern of destruction that they have visited upon historical sites across the territory they control there and in Iraq.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist and monitoring group based in Britain, said Sunday in a statement that Islamic State fighters detonated “a large quantity of explosives” that they had arranged around the Temple of Baalshamin, one of the most grand and well-preserved structures in the sprawling complex of ruins. A government official told reporters that it was heavily damaged by the blast.

The temple stood “dozens of meters” away from a Roman amphitheater where the Islamic State held a mass execution, killing 25 prisoners, in a video released last month, the activist group said. The entire ancient city of Palmyra is a Unesco World Heritage site.

 

Maamoun Abdul-Karim, the head of Syria’s Directorate of Antiquities and Museums, confirmed the activists’ account to Reuters, although the two accounts differed on when the temple was destroyed. The Syrian Observatory said the destruction took place last month, while Dr. Abdul-Karim said the militants bombed it on Sunday.

ISIS Blows Up Ancient Temple at Syria’s Palmyra Ruins - The New York Times

ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape - The New York Times

"He kept telling me this is ibadah,” she said, using a term from Islamic scripture meaning worship.

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The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group’s core tenets.

The trade in Yazidi women and girls has created a persistent infrastructure, with a network of warehouses where the victims are held, viewing rooms where they are inspected and marketed, and a dedicated fleet of buses used to transport them.

A total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are still being held, according to community leaders. To handle them, the Islamic State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery, including sales contracts notarized by the ISIS-run Islamic courts. And the practice has become an established recruiting tool to lure men from deeply conservative Muslim societies, where casual sex is taboo and dating is forbidden.

A growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual issued by the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last month. Repeatedly, the ISIS leadership has emphasized a narrow and selective reading of the Quran and other religious rulings to not only justify violence, but also to elevate and celebrate each sexual assault as spiritually beneficial, even virtuous.

“Every time that he came to rape me, he would pray,” said F, a 15-year-old girl who was captured on the shoulder of Mount Sinjar one year ago and was sold to an Iraqi fighter in his 20s. Like some others interviewed by The New York Times, she wanted to be identified only by her first initial because of the shame associated with rape.
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In the parking lot the same fleet of Hajj buses was waiting to take them to their next destination, said F. Along with 24 other girls and young women, the 15-year-old was driven to an army base in Iraq. It was there in the parking lot that she heard the word “sabaya” for the first time.

“They laughed and jeered at us, saying ‘You are our sabaya.’ I didn’t know what that word meant,” she said. Later on, the local Islamic State leader explained it meant slave.

“He told us that Taus Malik” — one of seven angels to whom the Yazidis pray — “is not God. He said that Taus Malik is the devil and that because you worship the devil, you belong to us. We can sell you and use you as we see fit.”

The Islamic State’s sex trade appears to be based solely on enslaving women and girls from the Yazidi minority. As yet, there has been no widespread campaign aimed at enslaving women from other religious minorities, said Samer Muscati, the author of the recent Human Rights Watch report. That assertion was echoed by community leaders, government officials and other human rights workers.

ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape - The New York Times

See also:

The Truth About Islam and Sex Slavery History Is More Complicated Than You Think

Antiquities scholar beheaded by IS in Palmyra, refused to say where treasures hidden | The Times of Israel

Islamic State militants beheaded one of Syria’s most prominent antiquities scholars in the ancient town of Palmyra, then strapped his body from one of the town’s Roman columns, Syrian state media and an activist group said Wednesday.

The killing of 81-year-old Khaled al-Asaad was the latest atrocity perpetrated by the group, which has captured a third of both Syria and Iraq. Since IS overran Palmyra in May, there have been fears the extremists, who have destroyed famed archaeological sites in Iraq, would demolish its 2,000-year-old Roman-era city at the town’s edge, one of the Mideast’s most spectacular archaeological sites.

According to Syrian state news agency SANA and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, al-Assad was beheaded on Tuesday in a square outside the town’s museum. The Observatory, which has a network of activists on the ground in Syria, said dozens of people gathered to witness the killing. Al-Asaad had been held by the IS for about a month, it added.

His body was then taken to Palmyra’s archaeological site and hung from one of the Roman columns, Maamoun Abdulkarim, the head of the Antiquities and Museums Department in Damascus, told SANA.

Antiquities scholar beheaded by IS in Palmyra, refused to say where treasures hidden | The Times of Israel

Mothers Of ISIS Recruits Fight Their Own Battles Back Home - The Huffington Post

Very powerful, very sad but a glimmer of hope,,,

These women are just four of thousands who have lost a child to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Since the Syrian civil war began four years ago, some 20,000 foreign nationals have made their way to Syria and Iraq to fight for various radical Islamist factions. Over 3,000 are from Western countries. While some go with their families’ blessing, most leave in secret, taking all sense of normalcy with them. After they’ve gone, their parents are left with a form of grief that is surreal in its specificity. It is sorrow at the loss of a child, it is guilt at what he or she may have done, it is shame in the face of hostility from friends and neighbors, and it is doubt about all the things they realize they did not know about the person whom they brought into the world. Over the last year, dozens of these mothers from around the world have found each other, weaving a strange alliance from their loss. What they want, more than anything, is to make sense of the senselessness of what happened to their children—and, perhaps, for something meaningful to come from their deaths.

[,,,]
What Boudreau had witnessed was a classic radicalization process, Koehler told me. Its phases are remarkably similar whether the person is joining a sect of religious extremists or a group of neo-Nazis. First, the recruit is euphoric because he has finally found a way to make sense of the world. He tries to convert those around him—and, in the case of radicalized Muslims in recent years, to make them care about the suffering of Syrians. The second, more frustrating stage comes when the convert realizes that his loved ones aren’t receptive to his message. This is when the family conflicts begin: arguments over clothing, alcohol, music. At this point, the convert begins to consider advice from his cohorts that perhaps the only way to be true to his beliefs is to leave home for a Muslim country. In the final stage, the person sells his possessions and often pursues physical fitness or some kind of martial training. As his frustration mounts, his desire to act becomes overwhelming, until he starts to see violence as the only solution.

[,,,]
Part of the problem is that the phenomenon of ISIS recruitment is so new that efforts to counter it are still in their infancy. Many Western countries are only starting to think about jihadi recruits in terms of prevention, rather than punishment or rehabilitation. Often, parents like Torill who actually sound the alarm are treated simply as sources of intelligence. Nor are many governments eager to bring radicals back once they have left: One American official told me privately that the U.S. would rather foreign fighters die in Syria than return home.

Mothers Of ISIS Recruits Fight Their Own Battles Back Home - The Huffington Post

Two gay men thrown to their deaths by ISIS – then children stone them | Metro News

Two gay men were thrown off a building and then stoned by children in a horrific execution by Islamic State militants.

Footage from a video posted online shows the men being tied up and blindfolded before being hurled off a rooftop in Homs, Syria.

A baying mob below, which included children, are then shown stoning the men with blood-splattered rocks seen scattered around the bodies.

It was unclear whether the men died in the fall or as a result of the stoning.

Afterwards, the six-minute video shows the ISIS militants appearing to conduct the rituals of an Islamic burial and dumping the bodies in an unmarked grave.

Two gay men thrown to their deaths by ISIS – then children stone them | Metro News

ISIS executioners kill 25 Syrian regime soldiers in front of crowds at Palmyra ruin | Daily Mail Online

On a command, the condemned soldiers are killed simultaneously with a shot to the head. 

ISIS captured the historic city on May 21, and has been systematically destroying the city's treasured ancient monuments. 

The group was accused of executing hundreds of people in and around Palmyra since it swept into the city in May, after a lightning advance across the desert from its stronghold in the Euphrates Valley to the east.  

ISIS is known for using children – dubbed ‘caliphate cubs’ – as suicide bombers, soldiers and executioners in their attempts to instill fear across Iraq and Syria.

Authorities fear that the use of children as soldiers and suicide bombers will only increase in the coming months.

ISIS executioners kill 25 Syrian regime soldiers in front of crowds at Palmyra ruin | Daily Mail Online

Islamic State beheads first women civilians - Telegraph

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant jihadists have beheaded two women in Syria for sorcery, an extension of the punishment which is normally reserved for men.

The women and their husbands were all accused of witchcraft, one couple in the town of Mayadeen, in eastern Deir Ezzour province, and one in Deir Ezzour city, according to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, which monitors the conflict.

Five people in all in Mayadeen were beheaded, the others on charges of “banditry” and “drugs”, with two of the men then crucified.

The case marks the first time a woman civilian is recorded as having been beheaded, though the punishment has been inflicted on women soldiers from the Kurdish militia, the YPJ, the female version of the YPG.

Islamic State beheads first women civilians - Telegraph

There is nothing more exhilarating than watching a master chess player make his move.

Love or hate him, President Obama is a smart man.  In the last 5 1/2 years he has managed to keep the US out of any new major conflicts.  (For the sake of argument we will leave Yemen, Pakistan, and Libya out of picture as there is a line that has been drawn as to whether we have boots on the ground or not.)

In one Memorial Day Speech in 2012 the President was quoted as saying:  "I can promise you I will never do so unless it is absolutely necessary and that when we do, we must give our troops a clear mission and the full support of a grateful nation."  For me, "the full support of a grateful nation" is the key.  Do you honestly believe he is not aware that the populace of this nation is against action in Syria?  He knows it would be political suicide and effectively making the remaining 2 years of his presidency a wash.  He is not that stupid!!

Why is he asking for permission from Congress to launch a strike on Syria unless he knew beyond a doubt he could get it?  In actuality he does not need their permission for a limited strike, so why ask? Although he would be treading on shaky ground, according to some pundits, despite the precedents set by Dwight Eisenhower when he sent Marines into Lebanon; John F. Kennedy with the blockaded of Cuba; Ronald Reagan who sent troops into Grenada and attacked Libya; and Bill Clinton who bombed Iraq (1993 and 1998), Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sudan and Kosovo.

The president knows this, so what so why does it appear that he wants this "limited" actions so badly?  The more I read and the more I try to understand foreign diplomacy, I have come to the conclusion that he does not want this action.  This is were the game of chess comes to play.

Rep. Peter King (R-L.I.): If Obama fails to back up his own words about the use of chemical weapons in Syria, he'll damage his personal reputation. In so doing, he’ll do long-term damage to the office of the President of the United States.  

Can any coherence be found in this? A charitable interpretation might be that Mr. Obama wishes to avoid immediate U.S. intervention but wants to pressure Moscow into changing its position by letting it be known that the alternative is greater U.S. support for the rebels. If so, Mr. Obama is being too clever. His weak and legalistic words about the need to verify a “chain of custody” on any chemical-weapons use and his declaration that even a hard confirmation would lead only to a “rethink [of] the range of options” simply invite further chemical attacks. 

As the United States prepares to begin sending direct military aid to rebels in Syria, Republican lawmakers criticized the White House for failing to act sooner and urged action to prevent a "blow up" among the war-torn country's neighbors.

"The whole region is about to blow up," Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham on NBC's Meet the Press, citing the potential effects of Syria's instability on Jordan, Egypt and Israel. "And our foreign policy to me -- I don't understand it.  Whatever it is is not working." 

Well boys and girls of the GOP you can't have it both ways, he drew the "red line" and is now willing to act to protect the reputation of the great American war machine, the defender of the world.   Now you have the audacity to say he is overstepping his powers.  So in essence President Obama had to do something.

The first move was whether to play the game to a draw or go for the win.  Which pawn to move first or should he move a knight?  President Obama chose wisely, the British Parliament was the first pawn moved when Parliament voted no to a joint action against Assad.  (The UN is also against the use of military force.)  The next move was putting any US participation in the hands of our do-nothing Congress with no chance they would give him the approval he needed.

Think of it this way, the goal of the Republicans since day one of President Obama's administration has been to make him a one term President built on obstruction.  If Obama suggested it, no matter what the issue the answer was and is always no.  That mindset has continued into the President's second term, although they appear to be more desperate in their attempts to reek havoc and chaos at our expense. 

So if the President wanted to use military force why is he pandering to these bozos?  Without a shot fired, and playing a masterful game without risking his queen, Congress now takes any and all responsibility for lack of action on the part of the US.  More importantly he has shifted some of the responsibility of a diplomatic resolution onto the world stage, enter Russia. But ultimately what he has accomplished, he has managed to make the Republicans come out as anti-war and has destroyed the Bush Doctrine.  The days of unilateral warfare is gone, the military industrial complex is destroyed. 

What we have is an American President suggesting a course of action, by allowing an elected body of officials to decide whether or not that action comes to fruition.  This is different from the Bush years and also conveniently destroys the right’s talking point about Dictator Obama.  It also weakens the GOP, as Congress will not have the ability to once again play games.  It will have to accept reasonable offers from the President in regards to domestic policy or be blamed for damage to our nation.

Throughout all this gamesmanship, we have no war., the US maintains its status as a strong world leader, and pressure is put on world leaders (the UN) to take other actions.   All accomplished without our military taking any action. Checkmate!!

Game over!!