By Hollie McKay Published February 27, 2015 FoxNews.com
Just 12 miles north of the ISIS-controlled city of Mosul, an American filmmaker and self-styled revolutionary is running a boot camp for Christians willing and able to fight for their lives and faith against the murderous Islamic terror organization.
Matthew VanDyke, an award-winning documentary filmmaker who escaped a Libyan prison after going there to help overthrow Col. Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, is helping to train hundreds of long-persecuted Assyrian Christians in everything from firearms to close quarters combat. VanDyke, who founded the security contracting firm company Sons of Liberty (SOLI), is working with an unnamed U.S. military veteran to get the Christian conscripts who range in age from 18 to 60 or older, ready to take on the ominous black clad army that lies dug in to Iraq’s second-largest city just over the horizon. Earlier this week, the first battalion of the Nineveh Plain Protection Units (NPU) graduated from the boot camp.
“They need to demonstrate that they can maintain and be responsible for their own security to encourage their people to stay – or else, within a couple of generations, there won’t be any Christians left in Iraq.”
– Matthew VanDyke
“It’s designed to help local sectarian forces in local communities facing threats of terrorism, insurgency or oppressive regimes to be able to defend themselves,” VanDyke told FoxNews.com from a base in the Kurdish region of Northern Iraq, where he hopes to help train 2,000 men. “It’s the step where the international community has failed or is moving too slow.”
The Assyrians, sometimes called Syriac Christians, belong to a variety of Christian sects and are a stateless ethnic group. One of the oldest civilizations from ancient Mesopotamia, they have their own culture, language and heritage sharply distinct from that of Arabian or Kurdish people. They speak a near-extinct language connected to Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus, and remain stateless – over the years enduring immense persecution and land expropriations.
While the Kurds have proven a worthy adversary of ISIS, with their battle-hardened Peshmerga pushing back the terrorist army in cities and villages throughout northern Iraq and Syria, the Christians and other religious minorities including the Yazidis have been slaughtered, starved and sent fleeing throughout the region since ISIS broke from Al Qaeda and began establishing a so-called caliphate in the region a year ago. Iraq’s Christian population, which numbered 1.5 million in 2004, has dwindled in the face of the ISIS onslaught while, VanDyke charges, the world has stood by.
“The international system has failed [Christian] communities around the world in recent years,” said VanDyke, a 35-year-old Baltimore native who obtained a master’s degree from Georgetown University’s vaunted Walsh School of Foreign ServiCe before embarking on a mercurial career that has seen him film and fight throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East. “Christianity is about to be wiped out in Iraq.
“They are down to less than 400,000. Many of those who have left will never return,” he continued. “They need to demonstrate that they can maintain and be responsible for their own security to encourage their people to stay – or else, within a couple of generations, there won’t be any Christians left in Iraq. This is their last chance.”
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