“If I don’t make it, teach my children, teach them the principles of Jesus Christ,” were some of the last words one of the victims of an ISIS mass-beheading in Libya spoke to his wife before leaving Egypt.
In February 2015, ISIS released a video of 21 Coptic Christians, originally from Egypt, being executed on a beach in Libya. The gentleman who spoke the words above left behind a family—along with the 20 other victims of this horrific crime.
Jacqueline Isaac is the vice president of the humanitarian group Roads of Success, and she went to Egypt to speak to 15 of the 21 families of the victims of the ISIS attack in Libya. She was then called upon to report her findings to the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee’s hearing on ISIS and religions minorities in May of 2015. The main focus of the committee was to evaluate what can be done to help the “Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, Yazidis, Alawites and others” who “are under mortal threat in their ancestral homelands,” according to the opening statement by Chairman Ed Royce.
When asked about the faith of the Coptic Christians and their families, Isaac said, “I was astonished by their faith.” She said some of the fathers of the victims said, “Thank God that today [my sons] they are in Heaven. Thank God.” Isaac reports that in Iraq, Christians “are standing strong and helping all, [and] helping the Yazidis.”
Although the hearing on ISIS and religious minorities was not covered by major news outlets, Isaac’s report is circulating. You can read the transcript of her words here. Along with others who testified during the hearing, Isaac’s report confirms suspicions that ISIS is murdering Christians and other religious minorities on a mass, some have even used the word genocidal, scale throughout northern Africa and the Middle East.
As Isaac succinctly puts it, “We cherish ethnic and religious diversity; ISIS hates it.”
Reminding us of Revelation 20:4, these believers literally were “beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God.” Let’s pray for this gentleman’s final wishes to come to pass, that his children might know the Lord Jesus Christ, and that they may be free to follow him.
You can hear Isaac give a part of her testimony to the House of Foreign Affairs Committee in the video below.
