An article on the circumstance of war amidst senseless slaughter in Syria

Shells were fired; women and children screaming and running in terror; the war has escalated once again on Syria’s border to Turkey, but this time to Turkey’s advantage. Feelings of anguish and betrayal are entrenched in the hearts and minds of the people as the shadow nation of “Kurdistan” once again desperately fights for survival. The President of the United States makes it clear that the “Kurds are no angels,” and that the invasion of their territory by Turkey is “Not our problem. What does the Turkey-Syria land deal have to do with us?… The ‘PKK’ is worst than ISIS… Russia hates ISIS and will help them fight… The Kurds are better off today than they were before we withdrew. They’ve been fighting this war for 1000 years, let them work it out.” Welcome to diplomacy, 2019, Trump administration style. This is only a precursor of many senseless things that are to come. From the perspective of true Christianity, this is a dangerous crisis that will get far worse before coming to a head, but it will come to a head! I am hopelessly sold out to the reality that our God is superior to all others, and He will show Himself valiantly on behalf of the disenfranchised and His own. How soon we forget that God loves everyone, even those that we despise.

The Kurds are a fairly large ethnic group but are considered a minority in the places that they reside in the Middle East. Their tribes are broken up into several different regions in multiple nations. Kurds are found in the mountains of Turkey (and Syria) bordering Syria (where the largest group of them live, possibly more than 14 million), Iraq (5-6 million), Iran (6 million), Syria (2 million), and Armenia (40,000 or less). There were over 80,000 Kurds in Armenia during the Soviet occupation. Approximately half of them were slaughtered during that period which causes great alarm to my very soul. When I hear America’s President say they are better off and safer in the hands of Russian infiltration without us, my heart weeps, bemoaning the extreme, insensitivity of our nation’s head and the church. They have made a deal with the “devil they know”, Russia, in order to survive.

The late founder of one of the greatest Charismatic Church organization of the 20th Century, Demos Shakarian, was an Armenian. Demos, as a child was removed from this fractious and volatile nation by his grandfather who believed a prophet of that nation. Years later God gave Demos, his grandson, a vision of his people and others being saved by the millions. He started Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship that gathered many souls for the kingdom throughout the world by inviting them to dinner. At the banquet, people would hear a stirring testimony from a speaker that melted the hearts of the hearers. It was a novel idea that still affects the church for good to this hour.

There is a greater reason to mention the Shakarians and Armenia: A boy, an Armenian prophet prophesied a Holocaust against its people back in the 1800s. This was the sagacity that caused grandpa Demos to move his family and others to America.

Look at this excerpt from Jim H (16 Dec 2010) “SECRET ARMENIAN PROPHECY”:

Demos was named after his grandfather, a remarkable man who fled from Armenia in 1905 to settle in Los Angeles, California…The family left their homeland in response to a prophecy in 1852 that a time of unspeakable tragedy would come to Armenia and that hundreds of thousands of people would be killed. When the same person who had given the prophecy announced the time for the tragedy was near, it was the sign for many people, including grandfather Demos to move… The prophet was a true prophet.

In 1914 the Turkish people drove the Armenian population out into the Mesopotamian desert. Over a million men, women and children died. They massacred another half a million people in their villages, often by locking them in barns and burning them to death. Everyone still in the home village of grandfather Demos died! The world did not respond to what was happening and allowed it to continue.
(http://www.fivedoves.com/letters/dec2010/jimh1216.htm)

Sounds pretty extraordinary, doesn’t it? Well, it is as frightening and extraordinary as it sounds! The most amazing thing about it is the fact that Grandpa Demos believed it! The avalanche affect caused millions to find Christ as Lord and Savior because of his alarming obedience to move his family to a strange land. Now I ask you, what might the slaughter of the Kurds, whether guilty or innocent, be prevented from happening in the greater Kingdom of God? You must read on and pray and find out…before it is too late!

That same prophet is alleged to have predicted mass carnage in America. It’s already happened once during the 9/11 disaster and is even reflected in the over 114,000 people that are shot each year in America. More than 36,000 of them die for known reasons and an additional 4700 for unknown. About 13,000 are murdered, 496 are killed by legal intervention, 300 die by unintentional shooting and about 509 women are killed by spouses or boyfriends. That constitutes a slaughter to me, and it’s of our own making. How long will we suffer this as the church until we act as representatives of His Kingdom? Will the Middle East disasters have to visit this nation again before we see the truth and acquiesce, or will it be too late?

As I have inferred, the legend goes on to say that there was a secret, sealed letter by this same prophet that announced another unbelievable event, this time to possibly happen in America. The young prophet demanded that God specified this envelope could only be unsealed and read by another prophet many years later. To my knowledge, this has not happened in the natural, but knowing God as I do, if the warning was real, someone has cracked the seal and relayed it in this generation. The mass atrocities of that time are threatening to repeat themselves in our dispensation of time.

What does this have to do with the poor Kurdish people? Everything! It is estimated that about 20-40 million Kurds live today in the regions acknowledged above. Most of them are Sunni Moslems but they all are united as one by their ethnicity and culture. Before the Great War, WW 1, these indigenous people were nomadic. They were free to roam their territory because of the establishment of the Ottoman Empire. This empire was Turkish and under the sultan of southwestern Asia, northeastern Africa, and southeastern Europe. It was named after the Ottoman Turks in the 13th century and lasted into the 20th Century until the evil fury of World War I. Even though the Ottoman Empire was small, it was mighty and grew greater and more pertinent than the Byzantine Empire that is often cited in Christian history, particularly known for its religious art. WW 1 took away their freedom and divided them into these small “nation-states” that now exist.

Kurds, like black Americans, have constantly fought to retain their national identity. They were forbidden in the mountainous regions to speak their language or wear their native clothing. They were discriminated against for centuries, and policies were created just to persecute them. In Turkey where the largest group of them abides, they are considered as a minority and are as pariah in this nation. If this sounds familiar to you, it may be because you are a black American who can relate directly to their oppression for many of the same reasons. We still fight for equality in every strata and sphere of society, and the thing that has kept us safe has been our conversion to true Christianity. Why does history continue to repeat itself?—Because the church supports the wrong answer more times than not when it comes to the point of history’s repetition. It’s time to receive the truth and break this deadly cycle. Only true apostles and prophets can bring that truth to the church and to the world, and if the church does not receive it, the world systems shall!

The Kurdish people of Turkey have fought the Turkish Empire for century upon century to procure a homeland of their own but to no avail. This fight has willfully energized the dispute that is taking place today, the invasion of Syrian Kurdish territory by Turkey. It is a gruesome, appalling plot to cleanse the earth of Kurds.

The Bible says, “Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight, so that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now My kingdom is not from here.” (John 18:36 NKJV). Jesus seems to fully understand that this was not His kingdom …yet! When we see Him again in Revelation 11:15 (NKJV) we must see that this is the time that these kingdoms become His! “Then the seventh angel sounded: And there were loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever!” Apostle Rick Daniels of Homestead FL, has taught us that the word “system” could be supplanted by the word kingdom. Put this in proper context and you will see that the systems of this world are becoming Christ’s. This is a powerful revelation that will increase when the church gets ahold of its blazing truth!

The Kurds quote an old proverb that has proven to be accurate towards them over and over again. “We have no friends but the mountains” should be set to music as the Kurdish National Anthem, that is, of course, if they were ever granted the ability to become a nation! It has been denied them over and over again by world powers that want to excoriate and rape their natural resources-rich lands.

The Kurdish people have desired to have their own empire since the later part of the 1800s and before. They thought their golden opportunity had come at the end of WW 1, but they were sadly mistaken. After the 1918 Armistice, boundaries of a possible “Kurdistan” were drawn up on their behalf. The Turks fought it causing the French and the British to destroy the plan resulting in them being divided between Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. Iraq crushed the last opportunity in 1924 with British help. My, is there any wonder in your mind as to why they “Did not help us in WW 1”, (a quote from President Trump as to why we have once again abandoned them)? I won’t go any further as to how their brilliant or sordid history got them a first-class ticket to hell. I will mention that they attacked Saddam Hussein when we were cozied up to him and he annihilated thousands of them, mostly civilians, in a movement of mass genocide that was overlooked by us when we decided to release them to the Syrian war. I’ll also mention what brought them to the insanity of today and what it means to Christianity.

We fell out of love with Hussein when he invaded Kuwait. The George W. Bush administration encouraged the Sunnis and Shiites to bring him down, and between them and us, we did. The south was crushed, but northern resistance got new wind with the inception of an initiative led by the UK, that permitted the creation of a self-governing Kurdish zone which became a pseudo sovereign commonwealth. However, as our history with them goes, we didn’t support it so it failed miserably leaving them at square one. They were reconstructed into the assemblage they unwillingly function in today. A militant group called the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) waged a 35-year long guerrilla war against Turkey, killing more than 40,000 people over time. The PKK is designated as a terrorist group by the USA, the EU and the UK, and several others. Despite the fact that they are a terror, they are not as great a threat to the USA and the world as ISIS, for they have been venal and mortal enemies of that aggregation.

President Trump’s illogical decision to withdraw the troops from Syria has caused cataclysmic problems worldwide, even to the Body of Christ. This will cause the resurgence of ISIS because of the release or breakout of prisons of the highest order in this chaotic, incendiary organization.

According to the Christian Broadcast Network, on-line article, “Who is Attacking the Kurds and Why.” (10–11-2019 by Julie Stahl, and Chris Mitchell), “The Kurds are a people with ancient roots that go back as far as the Medes and the Persians. The Biblical connection of the Kurds is obvious. They’re actually descendants of the ancient Medes. We heard in the Bible about the Medes and the Persians,” said Michele Bachmann, Director of the Jerusalem Prayer Breakfast. [ Queen Esther, who was used by Jehovah to save the Jews, was married to the Persian King, Ahasuerus.]

“The Medes were the people from whom the wise men came. Think of that. They were the people who first saw that Jesus was Messiah and took gold to worship at the feet of Jesus,” Bachmann told CBN News. “So these are natural allies. They love the United States. They love Israel but they have a Biblical basis as well. They’re well worth being allies and they’re worthy of our support,” she said.

At the end of World War I, Western powers promised the Kurds independence but several years later, they reneged on that promise. That betrayal was just one of many throughout Kurdish history. In the following decades, any attempt by the Kurds to have an independent state was brutally suppressed…

There are between two to four million people living in Northeast Syria. It’s hard to pin down exact numbers because of refugees and the mobility of the population fleeing violence. About two million Kurds live in Syria altogether, many of them in the northeast. Our sources say there are currently between 50,000-100,000 Christians living in Northeast Syria. (The Catholic News Agency, estimates there are about 40,000 Christians in the area – that’s a dramatic drop from 130,000 that lived there before the Syrian Civil War and ISIS attacks started in 2011.) There are also many Arab Muslims living there.

Northeast Syria, the area currently under siege from Turkey, is defended by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The SDF includes Kurdish fighters known as the YPG or People’s Protection Units — the national Kurdish army in Syria. The YPG is one of the main components of SDF, which also includes Arab Muslims and Assyrian/Syriac militias and some smaller groups of Armenian, Turkman and Chechen forces.

They are the fighting force that is now defending the area of the Self-Administration in North and East Syria or SANES after the U.S. pulled out its troops. SANES controls a third of Syria between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Between two to four million people live within its borders.

After the Syrian revolution began in 2011, the Assad regime began to pull out of Northeast Syria. The people of this region then had to fight first Al Qaeda and then ISIS. These two major developments led the people of this region to form a representative form of government not seen in the Middle East before.

Earlier this year, when President Trump initially threatened to withdraw American forces, the Christians in the area told CBN News they were afraid of a massacre based on what Turkish President Erdogan had done earlier in the northwestern Syrian city of Afrin.

Iraqi Kurds & the Peshmerga
In Iraq, there are some 5-6 million Kurds. Kurdish fighters there are known as Peshmerga – literally, those who face death. They were the tip of the spear, the main boots on the ground in the fight against ISIS in Iraq. They have faced their own history of massacres. In 1983, then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein massacred 8,000 members of the Barzani Tribe – just one of the many massacres of the Kurdish people. In 1988, Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurdish village of Halabja and killed five thousand Kurds, mostly women and children. That massacre took place during the three-year Anfal campaign that killed nearly 200,000 Kurds and destroyed nearly five thousand villages.
They’re still living with Saddam’s brutal legacy. He sowed ten million mines in the Kurdish mountains. Even now the US-based Genocide Watch said the Kurds are in “grave danger” of another genocide.

In September 2017, the Kurds of northern Iraq went to the polls and voted overwhelmingly for independence. They celebrated but the world, including the US, either ignored their dream of freedom or punished them economically. It was the latest blow to a people who have suffered for centuries.

Kurds in Turkey and the PKK
There are approximately 14-15 million Kurds in Turkey, a country of 80 million. The PKK or the Kurdistan Workers’ Party has been fighting for an independent state inside Turkey for decades. According to the BBC, it was founded in the late 1970s and started an armed struggle against the Turkish government in 1984. More than 40,000 people have died in the fighting that peaked in the mid-1990s. At that time, the Turkish government destroyed thousands of villages in the largely Kurdish areas of Turkey. The BBC quoted the PKK’s military leader Cemil Bayik in an interview earlier this year, saying, “We don’t want to separate from Turkey. We want to live within the borders of Turkey on our own land freely.”

Why Is Turkey Targeting the Kurds? Turkey’s authoritarian leader President Erdogan considers all the Kurds, whether they are in his country or not, to be terrorists. Therefore when he promises to protect “civilians” he is not referring to the Kurds who are protecting the population of Northeast Syria. Why? It’s important to note that while the PKK is considered even by the US to be a terrorist organization, none of the other Kurdish groups like the YPG or the Peshmerga are considered to be terrorists. The opposite is true. They have been the staunchest allies of the US.

Last week’s decision by the White House [October 2019] not to stand in the way of Turkish invasion builds on a bitter peshmerga forces fight [against] Hussein[‘s forces.] [They] were abruptly cut off. The Iraqi dictator’s army promptly counterattacked the stranded Kurdish fighters.

While the United States has credited the Kurds for helping defeat ISIS in Syria, the minority group has since been abandoned and is now in the center of yet another nightmare. How did it come to this? Here’s what you need to know:

In the chaos of the Syrian civil war, Kurdish fighters took control of key cities from the Syrian army and defended them from Islamic State when the group began to expand after 2014. The US, desperate for a reliable ally in Syria, assisted the Kurdish fight against IS with airstrikes and, eventually, money and weapons. Turkey watched the budding alliance with increasing alarm.

After last week’s phone call with the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Trump surprised the world – and many in his own administration – by announcing US troops would stand aside, effectively allowing the Turkish army to enter north-eastern Syria and clear the border areas of the Kurdish fighters that Ankara considers to be terrorists, and who until a few days ago were the US’s staunchest allies in the fight against the IS [and ISIS.]

It goes without saying that the questions raised here are certainly worth pondering. The USA has suddenly removed troops, putting them in harm’s way to exit the nation. 1000 souls that are our children, our aunts and uncles, fathers and mothers were in a difficult place because there was no plan or strategy executed to get them out or to hold ground for the Kurds. Even more insanely, these troops were sent to other deployments like Saudi Arabia, who will pay for their participation as if they were mercenaries! In Syria, they fought against terrorists and won, but are needed to desperately hold back those heinous forces. Turkey is now free to ethnically cleanse Kurds and Assyrians who are of no consequence to them. There was an announcement made of when we would leave without saying or planning who would replace us. There is literally no concern for this factor in that present volatility. Russia will be the greatest beneficiary of this miserable faux pas. Putin will be in a position to take over the nation of Ukraine and its oil reserves and other significant, natural resources including iron ore, coal, manganese, natural gas, salt, sulfur, graphite, titanium, magnesium, kaolin, nickel, mercury, and arable. Its production of grain is leading worldwide. This will finally give huge Russian inroads into Europe. The Bear is conquering (as I prophesied 5 times in 20 years) in the arena of finance and civil dispute and the Eagle has opened the door.

The damage at present is irreparable. There is a ceasefire and pause presently with a rendering of a deal, but everything favors Turkey and not the Kurds. They are being muscled into moving out of their territory for Turkish occupation. It’s been trivialized by the President of the USA as being a quarrel between “Two kids that are having a fight”, and yet many people are dying! No one is happy amongst the Kurds. The sanctions will be lifted against Turkey because of the cease-fire. Everyone that falls in death to this falls in silence to the west, even our own. Nothing is as it should be, but if this is what it
takes to awaken a slumbering church, the judgment from heaven will be swift and deliberate.

Please don’t tell yourself as the church that President Trump’s statement concerning the Kurds that Turkey “Had to have them [ the Kurds problem) cleaned out,” would never reach our shores! Don’t flatter yourself that this action is only happening so far away and that it has nothing to do with you! Wherever there is conflict in the world, the church must rise in love. This will absolutely affect and effect every nation of the world with the United States being chief amongst them. Today it is at Syria’s door but tomorrow it will find its way to your doorstep! Watch, fight and pray, are the watchwords of the hour. The plan for “ethnic cleansing” will not be resolved by ignoring it. Apostolic guardians on the earth must rise and pray until we extinguish it.

25 And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. 26 This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it. 27 TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. 28 PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.
Daniel 5: 25-28 (NKJV)

I leave you with hopefully a clearer picture of what has happened, and with a valiant appeal for the prayers of the righteous to prevail. If we ignore this as an apostolic people, it will land on our doorway on swift wings. This is not a Kurdish problem. This is a Kingdom problem with answers that will change the world forever. Don’t be a spectator and assay that pity should be accorded to the Kurds, but lift your voice on their behalf as though it could come to your nation. This oppression is already here. God has unveiled it and thinks we can defeat it. Let he who has an ear hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s true, awakened church.

14” For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place; but thou and thy father’s house shall be destroyed: and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?
Esther 4: 14 (KJV)