Background …
It’s true that Turkey has been fighting the Kurds for a very long time. The Kurds are now the 4th largest people group in the region and yet they have no land of their own. After World War II, land was ceded to them by the victorious Allied Forces, just as land was given to Israel for a homeland. However, a few short months later the United Nations voted to take it away from them, leaving them again as refugees seeking to survive extinction and to acquire land wherever they could. Saddam Hussein did not want them and used chemical weapons to eradicate them. Syria didn’t want then neither did Turkey, Iran or Armenia
Their past …
The Kurds are a mixed group. When the Assyrian king Sennacherib (705-681 BC) invaded Judah and was repulsed by the Heavenly armies of God, losing 185,000 men overnight, he retreated to his homeland. He had felt the right to invade because several years earlier he had invaded the territory of the Israelites to the north of Judah, conquering them he took some 200,150 of them back to his homeland as slaves. After leaving Lebanon and Israel, Hezekiah, king of Judah recaptured some of those towns. Sennacherib retaliated with an invasion of Judah conquering 46 of their towns before besieging Jerusalem. There being defeated by God, he returned home.
Over time the captured masses of Israel and Judah married with the Assyrians and the mixed nations living there also as slaves, and several thousand years later, became known as the Kurds. Thus, ancestrally, they like the Samaritans, are part Hebrew (however slightly now) and part non-Hebrew (slaves of Hittite, Elamite, Urartu, Babylonian, Scythian, Lydian, Persian, Ugarit, etc.).
The primary region of their homeland, known more recently as Kurdistan, was an area surrounding Lake Van (a hundred miles SE of Mt. Ararat) in what is now eastern Turkey, western Armenia and northwest Iran and northeast Iraq. It was, for hundreds of years, the kingdom of the Ururtu (also called Van) which Sennacherib finally conquered and disseminated nearly two hundred years later. We read about these people in the Bible. Remember the story of the Prodigal son? That was a prince named Arrias who had an older brother named Urrais and a father named Cherimachinus. The remains of their fortress still stand overlooking the Araxes River. It was destroyed by Urrais and centuries later rebuilt by Alexander the Great. Arrias had gone south to live out his life in the Assyrian capital of Ashur, a city founded by Ashur, the son of Shem and grandson of Noah. The prophesy of Shem (or his descendants) ruling over the sons of Canaan was fulfilled by Sennacherib. He conquered all of Canaan’s tribes: Sidon, Heth, the Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites, Hivites, Arkites, Arvadites, Zemarites and the Sinites.
In time, some twelve hundred years later, Arartu was conquered by Islamic forces and converted to Islam. Saddam Hussein came from an area that was inhabited to a large degree by Kurdish people, though it was not “theirs”. This no doubt fueled the hatred he and his people already had for them. The great Muslim crusader Saladin, who fought against Richard the Lionheart, was also from that region and some say, was himself a Kurd.
Their present …
In recent decades the Kurds were protected by US troops, being trained and armed to defend themselves. After that they have worked aggressively alongside the US troops in our efforts to wipe out ISIS. All the while, a group among them called the KKP worked to secure their own homeland without any restraint from the USA. During our recent wars we needed the help of Turkey, which had become a member of NATO, and thus our government, no doubt under duress of treaties, also listed the PKK as terrorists. Over the past decade their leader was captured and held prisoner by the Turkish government. He was released a few years ago with the commitment of peace. Since that time (the past three years) there has not been a single attack from the PKK against the government of Turkey.
No doubt, men being men and all being sinful, there have been breaches, or at least the fear of them. Turkey now insists logically on having a buffer zone along its Syrian border to keep the constant fighting from spilling over into its territories. The problem is that most of that border is occupied by the Kurds, who have been fighting ISIS, Iranian supported militias, radical terrorist groups fighting Assad and the Syrian army itself. Since Turkey’s invasion last week, already scores have been killed and Kurdish government members publicly assassinated. So much so that the European nations are joining with the USA in placing economic sanctions against Turkey.
In the mean time Syrian and Russian counterparts have invaded the same land to stop the invasion, which could easily start a World War. Russia has recently signed a 95-year treaty with Syria giving them permission to occupy Syria and particularly the port city of Latakia, which has become Russia’s only Mediterranean seaport. A piece of real estate they are not likely to walk away from. It is likely that in the months to come, that Egypt, Saudi Arabia and its allies and even Israel will enter the fray in efforts to either further stop the expansion of Turkey and the Shia influenced spread of Iran into its proxy, Syria, or both. Expect to see a new coalition of Sunni Muslim nations rise up to protect the international oil interests of OPEC.
Where does that leave us and our ministry? …
It is not true that this fight is just between the Kurds, Turkey and Syrian forces. That would be bad enough but there are other actors as well. Syrian rebel forces, (Jabhat al’ Nusra and others) highly crippled but still active and controlling a small portion of northwest Syria hate the Kurds because they have been heavily afflicted by them militarily. They also hate Christianity. For them, to kill a Kurd is vengeance, to kill a Christian an obligation, but to kill a Kurdish Christian is a pure delight.
We have had numerous events in this region over the past decade, almost always with devastating results. As our final people prepare to flee, they have to watch for these groups as well. Literally, everyone in the region is against us and wanting to kill our people because they are Kurds and because they are Christians.
You may recall events in the past when we had to rescue some of our women from being sold as sex slaves to terrorist cells (the next Progress Report has a recent testimony of one of these) and children in our churches who were captured and their organs being cut out and sold. Many of you helped us rescue dozens of them in these situations. They are among those we are now trying to transport to safety.
I recall once when a group of our teens met at their house church for a “youth activity”. Their activity was a prayer meeting! While they prayed, three gunmen burst the door down and with machine guns, killed all 48 teenagers. How fruitful is our work that just one house church can have 48 teenagers!
At one time we had 9 house churches like that one, today we have only 4. The others have all been exterminated or moved to safety and that is the fate that awaits the final four if we don’t rescue them now. I suppose if we were super-heroes, we could do so easily, but we are not; we can however be super-Christians and do all we can individually to help them.
Last Friday the war zone was 30 miles away from our people. Now it is less than five. As you can see, we have a very short time to act. And now, rather than them fleeing into the wilderness ahead of the invading army with some hope of escape, they will be met by advancing Syrian forces who see them (as Kurds) being a group that until Sunday night’s treaty, were their sworn enemies. What guarantee of safety do they have against Syrian revenge, especially with no journalists among them?
How you can help …
At this time, we have 45 families (about 210 people) that need to be moved. This is women and children only. The men (another 70+) have been told that they are on their own unless we get enough funds. The cost, we expect, is $25,214 based on what we have been given as an estimate. We have to arrange transportation meaning vehicles with drivers, as well as fuel costs -- if it is still available. And as I told one of our dear supporters earlier yesterday, the price for fuel agreed on can quickly escalate, as the invaders get closer. Not only that, but the vehicles we have reserved will eventually be driven away with their own masters, fleeing the surge of troops and leaving our people stranded. For this reason, we must act NOW before prices rise and the escape routes are blocked.
Logistically this is a challenge. Transportation is only the beginning. We need to have potable water for them, food, a place to stay when they arrive and sustenance for a few weeks, while we disseminate them to the homes of Believers scattered around the country. The detailed logistics of providing food, clothing, medical care, transportation, etc. then trying as well to do what we can to help their fathers, sons and brothers is overwhelming. I don’t have the funds needed and most likely, you don’t either. But together we can accomplish it if enough of us care to do so.
Give online - https://www.myegiving.com/app/giving/finalfrontiers (Select "Middle East" and then "Relocation")
or mail in support and designate it to "Middle East Relocation"
Jon Nelms
PS For those of you who will want to know, we have no estimate on what it would take to get the men out as well, but considering the cost per person of about $120, I would expect it to be an additional $8,000 to $10,000. The men will not leave until their families are safely away, then they will begin their march through the valley of the shadow of death. But guess who will be with them!
It’s true that Turkey has been fighting the Kurds for a very long time. The Kurds are now the 4th largest people group in the region and yet they have no land of their own. After World War II, land was ceded to them by the victorious Allied Forces, just as land was given to Israel for a homeland. However, a few short months later the United Nations voted to take it away from them, leaving them again as refugees seeking to survive extinction and to acquire land wherever they could. Saddam Hussein did not want them and used chemical weapons to eradicate them. Syria didn’t want then neither did Turkey, Iran or Armenia
Their past …
The Kurds are a mixed group. When the Assyrian king Sennacherib (705-681 BC) invaded Judah and was repulsed by the Heavenly armies of God, losing 185,000 men overnight, he retreated to his homeland. He had felt the right to invade because several years earlier he had invaded the territory of the Israelites to the north of Judah, conquering them he took some 200,150 of them back to his homeland as slaves. After leaving Lebanon and Israel, Hezekiah, king of Judah recaptured some of those towns. Sennacherib retaliated with an invasion of Judah conquering 46 of their towns before besieging Jerusalem. There being defeated by God, he returned home.
Over time the captured masses of Israel and Judah married with the Assyrians and the mixed nations living there also as slaves, and several thousand years later, became known as the Kurds. Thus, ancestrally, they like the Samaritans, are part Hebrew (however slightly now) and part non-Hebrew (slaves of Hittite, Elamite, Urartu, Babylonian, Scythian, Lydian, Persian, Ugarit, etc.).
The primary region of their homeland, known more recently as Kurdistan, was an area surrounding Lake Van (a hundred miles SE of Mt. Ararat) in what is now eastern Turkey, western Armenia and northwest Iran and northeast Iraq. It was, for hundreds of years, the kingdom of the Ururtu (also called Van) which Sennacherib finally conquered and disseminated nearly two hundred years later. We read about these people in the Bible. Remember the story of the Prodigal son? That was a prince named Arrias who had an older brother named Urrais and a father named Cherimachinus. The remains of their fortress still stand overlooking the Araxes River. It was destroyed by Urrais and centuries later rebuilt by Alexander the Great. Arrias had gone south to live out his life in the Assyrian capital of Ashur, a city founded by Ashur, the son of Shem and grandson of Noah. The prophesy of Shem (or his descendants) ruling over the sons of Canaan was fulfilled by Sennacherib. He conquered all of Canaan’s tribes: Sidon, Heth, the Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites, Hivites, Arkites, Arvadites, Zemarites and the Sinites.
In time, some twelve hundred years later, Arartu was conquered by Islamic forces and converted to Islam. Saddam Hussein came from an area that was inhabited to a large degree by Kurdish people, though it was not “theirs”. This no doubt fueled the hatred he and his people already had for them. The great Muslim crusader Saladin, who fought against Richard the Lionheart, was also from that region and some say, was himself a Kurd.
Their present …
In recent decades the Kurds were protected by US troops, being trained and armed to defend themselves. After that they have worked aggressively alongside the US troops in our efforts to wipe out ISIS. All the while, a group among them called the KKP worked to secure their own homeland without any restraint from the USA. During our recent wars we needed the help of Turkey, which had become a member of NATO, and thus our government, no doubt under duress of treaties, also listed the PKK as terrorists. Over the past decade their leader was captured and held prisoner by the Turkish government. He was released a few years ago with the commitment of peace. Since that time (the past three years) there has not been a single attack from the PKK against the government of Turkey.
No doubt, men being men and all being sinful, there have been breaches, or at least the fear of them. Turkey now insists logically on having a buffer zone along its Syrian border to keep the constant fighting from spilling over into its territories. The problem is that most of that border is occupied by the Kurds, who have been fighting ISIS, Iranian supported militias, radical terrorist groups fighting Assad and the Syrian army itself. Since Turkey’s invasion last week, already scores have been killed and Kurdish government members publicly assassinated. So much so that the European nations are joining with the USA in placing economic sanctions against Turkey.
In the mean time Syrian and Russian counterparts have invaded the same land to stop the invasion, which could easily start a World War. Russia has recently signed a 95-year treaty with Syria giving them permission to occupy Syria and particularly the port city of Latakia, which has become Russia’s only Mediterranean seaport. A piece of real estate they are not likely to walk away from. It is likely that in the months to come, that Egypt, Saudi Arabia and its allies and even Israel will enter the fray in efforts to either further stop the expansion of Turkey and the Shia influenced spread of Iran into its proxy, Syria, or both. Expect to see a new coalition of Sunni Muslim nations rise up to protect the international oil interests of OPEC.
Where does that leave us and our ministry? …
It is not true that this fight is just between the Kurds, Turkey and Syrian forces. That would be bad enough but there are other actors as well. Syrian rebel forces, (Jabhat al’ Nusra and others) highly crippled but still active and controlling a small portion of northwest Syria hate the Kurds because they have been heavily afflicted by them militarily. They also hate Christianity. For them, to kill a Kurd is vengeance, to kill a Christian an obligation, but to kill a Kurdish Christian is a pure delight.
We have had numerous events in this region over the past decade, almost always with devastating results. As our final people prepare to flee, they have to watch for these groups as well. Literally, everyone in the region is against us and wanting to kill our people because they are Kurds and because they are Christians.
You may recall events in the past when we had to rescue some of our women from being sold as sex slaves to terrorist cells (the next Progress Report has a recent testimony of one of these) and children in our churches who were captured and their organs being cut out and sold. Many of you helped us rescue dozens of them in these situations. They are among those we are now trying to transport to safety.
I recall once when a group of our teens met at their house church for a “youth activity”. Their activity was a prayer meeting! While they prayed, three gunmen burst the door down and with machine guns, killed all 48 teenagers. How fruitful is our work that just one house church can have 48 teenagers!
At one time we had 9 house churches like that one, today we have only 4. The others have all been exterminated or moved to safety and that is the fate that awaits the final four if we don’t rescue them now. I suppose if we were super-heroes, we could do so easily, but we are not; we can however be super-Christians and do all we can individually to help them.
Last Friday the war zone was 30 miles away from our people. Now it is less than five. As you can see, we have a very short time to act. And now, rather than them fleeing into the wilderness ahead of the invading army with some hope of escape, they will be met by advancing Syrian forces who see them (as Kurds) being a group that until Sunday night’s treaty, were their sworn enemies. What guarantee of safety do they have against Syrian revenge, especially with no journalists among them?
How you can help …
At this time, we have 45 families (about 210 people) that need to be moved. This is women and children only. The men (another 70+) have been told that they are on their own unless we get enough funds. The cost, we expect, is $25,214 based on what we have been given as an estimate. We have to arrange transportation meaning vehicles with drivers, as well as fuel costs -- if it is still available. And as I told one of our dear supporters earlier yesterday, the price for fuel agreed on can quickly escalate, as the invaders get closer. Not only that, but the vehicles we have reserved will eventually be driven away with their own masters, fleeing the surge of troops and leaving our people stranded. For this reason, we must act NOW before prices rise and the escape routes are blocked.
Logistically this is a challenge. Transportation is only the beginning. We need to have potable water for them, food, a place to stay when they arrive and sustenance for a few weeks, while we disseminate them to the homes of Believers scattered around the country. The detailed logistics of providing food, clothing, medical care, transportation, etc. then trying as well to do what we can to help their fathers, sons and brothers is overwhelming. I don’t have the funds needed and most likely, you don’t either. But together we can accomplish it if enough of us care to do so.
Give online - https://www.myegiving.com/app/giving/finalfrontiers (Select "Middle East" and then "Relocation")
or mail in support and designate it to "Middle East Relocation"
Jon Nelms
PS For those of you who will want to know, we have no estimate on what it would take to get the men out as well, but considering the cost per person of about $120, I would expect it to be an additional $8,000 to $10,000. The men will not leave until their families are safely away, then they will begin their march through the valley of the shadow of death. But guess who will be with them!
