A Syrian Christian mother shared her story of escaping the Islamic State terrorist group in a suburb of Damascus while losing her son, George, after he refused to identify himself to the terrorists by a Muslim name.
The woman, Alice Assaf, said that she had heard that her son, who was beaten and shot to death, was spared a much worse fate: being baked in the ovens of the local bakery or “kneaded” to death in the bakery’s industrial-sized mixer.
Assaf told her story to Roads of Success, a human rights NGO with a focus on the rights of women and Christians in the Middle East. The group has provided testimony of the plight of Christians and Yazidis persecuted by the Islamic State to the House Foreign Relations Committee and regularly publishes video interviews with ISIS attack survivors.
The Christian Post picked up the story and video interview, in which Assaf narrates the final days of her 18-year-old’s life.
Assaf says her suburb was targeted two years ago by Islamic State jihadists. She and her children hid in the home of a Muslim neighbor when she first heard that ISIS had come to town to kill its Christian population.
“Later on, we heard that the militants grabbed six strong men working at the bakery and burned them inside the oven. After that, they caught some 250 kids and kneaded them like dough in the bakery dough machine,” she said.
When the army of dictator Bashar al-Assad arrived to quell the ISIS uprising, the jihadist began throwing children off of balconies and roofs in an attempt to scare the soldiers away. “The oldest was 4,” she recalls.
The killing, “in the beginning… was against Christians,” but they later started killing anyone who they believed affiliated to the Syrian army.