Girl burned alive by ISIS told mother to forgive attackers
A young girl who was burned alive by ISIS lay dying in her mother's arms and told her to forgive the attackers.
Speaking at a New York conference in April, human rights advocate Jacqueline Isaac talked about what happened to the girl and her mother as an example of Christian persecution in Mosul, Iraq, Express reported.
She said nembers of the terror group knocked at the door and asked the girl's mother to either pay the jizya right away or leave the place. The jizya is a tax imposed by ISIS on non-Muslim inhabitants of the places they control.
The mother told ISIS that she would pay, but asked them to wait "a few seconds" because her daughter was in the shower at that moment.
"They said 'you don't have a few seconds' and they lit the house with a torch from the bathroom the daughter was showering in," Isaac said.
As the flames spread throughout the house, the mother and her daughter were able to escape. The girl, who was believed to be around 12 years old, suffered from serious injuries that left her mother "scrambling, doing anything to save her."
The girl was immediately brought to a hospital, but the fire had given her fourth degree burns. She died after a few hours, leaving her mother a sweet reminder before she passed away.
"The last thing her daughter said: 'Forgive them,'" Isaac said.
According to nonprofit organization Open Doors, there is "extreme" Christian persecution in Iraq. Although Christians have lived in Iraq for 2,000 years, so many of them have fled for fear for their lives, and those who are left are "on the verge of extinction."
The persecution of Christians in Iraq is brought about mostly by members of Islamic terror group ISIS, who want to cleanse the place from non-Islamic inhabitants and make it purely Islamic.
