PAYBACK! Christian ‘Babylon Brigades’ oust ISIS jihadis from monastery in bloody battle
CHRISTIAN defence forces have captured suspected Islamic State militants hiding in a Catholic monastery in Iraq during the battle to reclaim Mosul in northern Iraq.
By TOM BATCHELOR
Express.co.uk
Wed, Nov 23, 2016
Known as the Iraqi Christian forces Kataeb Babylon – or Babylon Brigades – the group has been working to reclaim the city of Mosul from ISIS fanatics.
The extremists were captured near the Mar Benham Syriac Catholic monastery in the town of Khidr Ilyas southeast of Mosul on Tuesday.
Iraqi fighters battling to oust the Islamist death cult – also know by its Arabic acronym Daesh – from Mosul captured the Catholic Mar Benham monastery over the weekend, allowing its priests to return after a two-year absence.
Dating back to the fourth century AD, the monastery lies just 20 miles south of Iraq’s second city, which became a bastion of the jihadi group which swept across northern Iraq in 2014.
ISIS filmed the destruction of part of the church in 2015 when it detonated a bomb outside the building, part of a wave of terror on religious and archaeological sites that do not fit with the group’s twisted ideology.
They also burned a collection of books about Christian theology, scraped off inscriptions written in Syriac – the language used by Jesus – and demolished sculptures of the Virgin Mary and the monastery’s patron saint.
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