There’s not many groups that the pseudo-Islamist blood cult known as the «Islamic State» or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have not targeted for genocide. However, the Middle East’s ancient Christian community has fared worse under Islamic State occupation than have Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, Shi’a Muslims, Syrian Alawites, moderate Sunni Muslims, and Palestinian refugees. Only the Yazidis have suffered the same degree merciless genocide by the Saudi- and Israeli-backed Islamic State forces as have the Christians. Thousands of Christians have fled their historic cities, towns, and monastic communities for safety in other countries outside the rule of the self-proclaimed Islamic «caliphate» of ISIL, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

One of the first Christian communities to flee ISIL «blood cult» marauders was that of Raqqa, Syria. Raqqa was the first major city to fall to ISIL after the Israeli Mossad and U.S. Central Intelligence Agency permitted arms allegedly destined for the almost-nonexistent «Free Syrian Army» to falls into the hands of ISIL and their Jabhat al-Nusra allies. Although Christians represented only one percent of Raqqa’s 300,000 population, almost all fled or were killed after ISIL burned down and defaced churches and imposed a confiscatory «dhimma» religious tax on Christians of 17 grams of gold from each Christian male. In all, a half million Syrian Christians have fled their country thanks to Saudi, Western, and Israeli support for ISIL and affiliated radicals.

The Saudis and Qataris also helped finance the so-called «Islamist» state juggernaut in Syria, which eventually poured over the border into western and northern Iraq and immediately posed a threat to Assyrian Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities.

The United States and, in particular, the Central Intelligence Agency under its fanatically pro-Saudi director, John Brennan, has, in addition to permitting weapons and financial aid to reach ISIL and allied forces in Syria and Iraq, provided intelligence, materiel, and propaganda support to the Saudi-led coalition battling Houthi and patriotic Yemeni forces in that nation’s multi-sided civil war. This has placed the United States on the same side as ISIL/Al Qaeda forces in South and North Yemen that have received covert assistance from the Saudis in carrying out horrific terrorist attacks upon the Houthis and members of the Zaidi Islamic sect who support them. Although Yemen’s Christian population is very small, the threat posed by ISIL and its allies to foreign workers in Yemen, including Christians, prompted their mass evacuation from the country, mainly through the port of Aden.

After the ISIL scourge crossed from Syria into Iraq, many, armed with U.S. weapons delivered to the «Free Syrian Army» by the CIA and Pentagon, set out to attack the Christians of northern Iraq. As a bonus, ISIL guerrillas captured U.S. weapons from deserting Iraqi troops. In June 2014, Mosul was the first major Christian population center to fall to ISIL, prompting most of the city’s 80,000 Christians to flee the region. ISIL set about to destroy churches of the Chaldean Catholic archdiocese and the Assyrian Orthodox diocese in Mosul. The Assyrians speak Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus as his primary tongue. In fact, on his visit to Palestine and Israel, Pope Francis schooled an arrogant Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who believed he knew otherwise, on the fact that Aramaic was Jesus’s main language and that Hebrew was a second tongue.

There were three large Assyrian Christian denominations active in Mosul before the city’s fall to the Islamist cultists: the Assyrian Church of the East ( known as "Nestorian"), the Syriac Orthodox Church (called "Jacobite"), and the Chaldean Church of Babylon (Roman Catholic rite). Priceless religious artifacts were smashed and burned by the crypto-cultist «caliphate» marauders. In July 2014, ISIL leaders proudly proclaimed that Mosul had been «cleansed» of Christians. There was nary a peep from Israel about the religious cleansing of Mosul even though its propaganda machine conveniently ensures that the Nazi cleansing of Jews from Europe receives front page attention every time Israel faces criticism for its own atrocities against the Palestinians. Nor did Israel’s friends in the «Christian Zionist» community in the United States raise any alarms over the pogrom by ISIL and its Saudi and Qatari financiers against the Christians of northern Iraq and Syria.

By February 2015, ISIL had cemented ties with like-minded cultists in Libya, many of whom were propelled into power by the NATO intervention in that nation and the bloody overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi. Thanks to the efforts of French «philosopher» Bernard-Henry Levy, who shuttled between rebel-held areas of Benghazi and Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem, the most radical Islamist jihadi factions took over power from Qaddafi in and around Benghazi. These factions ultimately swore allegiance to the Islamic State, which, in February 2015 carried out the mass beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christian oil workers on a Mediterranean beach near Tripoli. That same month, ISIL terrorists kidnapped 300 Assyrian Christians in Iraq, including a number of children, from their villages along the Khabur River. The kidnapping sent some 1300 additional Assyrians fleeing for their lives from the area.

On March 15, 2015, inspired and funded by the same Saudi Wahhabist elements who provide assistance to ISIL and its like-minded blood-lusting allies, the Pakistani Taliban bombed two churches in Lahore, killing over a dozen Christian faithful. Four days later, ISIL detonated the 4th Century Mar Benham Christian monastery in Bakhdida, near Mosul. The 1600 year-old building was built by Assyrian king Senchareb and was a UNESCO-protected World Heritage Site.

As ISIL forces approached the outer edges of Baghdad, many of the 100,000 Christians remaining in the city prepared to evacuate. Iraq’s Christians thrived before the U.S. invasion and occupation and even counted one of their own, Tariq Aziz, as Iraq’s foreign minister and deputy prime minister under Saddam Hussein. Rather than demolish Christian churches, Saddam used part of Iraq’s oil revenue to repair many Iraqi churches worn down by time and neglect.

On April 3, 2015, Maundy Thursday, when Christians were celebrating Jesus’s Last Supper, Islamist guerrillas of the Somali-based and ISIL-aligned Al Shabaab group, stormed into the campus of Garissa University in Kenya and massacred 147 Christian students. The guerrillas ensured that the Christians were singled out from other students before they were executed. Meanwhile, ISIL supporters within the Nigerian group Boko Haram continued to target Christians in that beleaguered nation.

To those like the CIA’s Brennan, the Israeli benefactors of ISIL/Nusra in Syria and Iraq, and others who turn a blind eye to ISIL’s war against Christianity, Pope Francis, in his Good Friday message, had a simple but dire warning: «We risk, all of us, the institutions and the people of the Western world, to be Pontius Pilate who wash their hands of such atrocities». However, many Wahhabists, Muslim Brotherhood members, and right-wing Israelis take pleasure in the fact that ISIL has declared Christianity, not Judaism or Shi’a Islam, to be its «Number 1 enemy». This is spelled out in the ISIL propaganda booklet titled «Dabiq».

ISIL propaganda has depicted ISIL’s black flag flying over St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. ISIL says it will eventually conquer Italy, Spain, the Balkans, and Austria. There is only one way to stamp out the scourge of ISIL forever and that is to ensure that the governments of Syria and Iraq, as well as the exiled remnants of supporters of Qaddafi of Libya ensure that the only flag that is torn down and replaced is that of the Saudi monarchy which flies over Riyadh, Jeddah, Mecca, and Medina. With that flag gone, the flags of ISIL and Al Qaeda will never fly over another church in the Middle East or elsewhere.