They came before dawn, under the cover of darkness. Overpowering and killing three village guards, they took hundreds of captives — men, women and children, from the elderly to the very young. Then they looted homes and shops before reducing the village churches to rubble with high explosives. 

This was the start of one of history’s saddest, strangest, least-known hostage crises, which began 10 years ago on Feb. 23, 2015. The setting was war-torn northeast Syria. Within the territory controlled by Kurdish fighters was a string of Assyrian Christian farming villages along the Khabur River. These Assyrians had arrived in French Mandate Syria as refugees in the 1930s. Before that, they had been driven from their Anatolian mountain homeland by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War, found temporary refuge in Iran, moved to Iraq, and then fled from massacres carried out by Iraqi nationalist troops. 

These Christians were members of the Assyrian Church of the East, an ancient Church that flourished under the Persian Empire and has a rich spiritual and cultural history. The Assyrian Church has been in fruitful dialogue with the Catholic Church for decades and in 1994 signed a common Christological declaration. Members of the Assyrian Church can receive Holy Communion in the Chaldean Catholic Church (in communion with Rome) and vice versa, if no other options are available. Only last year, Pope Francis included the Assyrian mystic and theologian St. Isaac of Nineveh in the Roman Martyrology. 

The Khabur raid on the Assyrians was carried out by the Islamic State, the Salafi-Jihadist terror group that had seized vast territories in Syria and Iraq. It was a time of extreme violence inflicted on the region’s Christians by the group.  

Less than two weeks before the attack on the Assyrians, the Islamic State had staged the grotesque slaughter of 21 Christians — the Coptic Martyrs of Libya — on a beach at Sirte. Two months later, in April 2015, Islamic State propagandists released another horrific video, this one featuring the massacre of 30 Ethiopian Christians, also in Libya.  

Johny Messo, president of the World Council of Arameans, recalled his reaction to those days in an interview with Aleteia:

“I remember receiving the call in the evening. A contact from the Khabur region, his voice trembling, told me that ISIS had just stormed the villages, taking women, children and the elderly hostage. He didn’t know where they were taken. Entire families had disappeared overnight while their homes and churches were reduced to rubble. The fear in his voice haunted me for days.”  

The Assyrian hostages, 226 of them, were taken to ISIS-controlled territory nearby. They were harassed and repeatedly pressured to convert to Islam but were otherwise relatively unharmed. It seems that, possibly, one of them converted. 

Contact was made through local Arab tribes. The terrorist group, which over the years had targeted and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Christians, offered to release the hostages in exchange for ransom. Media reports cited demands of $50,000 per person or a total of $11 million. What actually transpired remains unknown and will likely never be fully revealed. 

At the time, countries like France, Italy and Spain secured the release of hostages from terror groups, including ISIS, that had demanded ransom payments. All three countries denied that any payments were paid. The practice is illegal in many countries and remains a contentious issue among terrorism experts. Israel, in contrast, has negotiated hostage exchanges, at times releasing convicted terrorists and killers for its captives, including women and children. 

Whatever the details, the effort to secure the release of Assyrian hostages was slow and arduous, led by the local Bishop Mar Afram Athneil. The Assyrian diaspora — a relatively small, poor Church of working-class parishioners scattered across the globe — mobilized to do what it could.  

During the crisis, Australian-Assyrian academic Nicholas al-Jeloo gave a lecture at a local church, appealing for contributions. More than 500 people donated something that night. Two of the captives were his cousins. With such a small community of Assyrian Christians remaining, everyone knew someone connected in some way with the hostages — whether as relatives, friends or acquaintances of extended families. 

On March 1, 2015, 19 hostages were released. On March 3, four more were freed, including a 6-year-old girl, Mariana Mirza. On May 26, two ladies in their 80s were also released. Then, on Aug. 12, 22 more hostages — 14 of them women — were set free. 

Evidently dissatisfied with the pace of the exchanges, on Sept. 23, the terrorist group executed three hostages — Dr. Abdelmassih Enwiya, Assur Rustam Abraham and Bassam Issa Michael — and released a gruesome video of their murder on the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice, Eid al-Adha. A month later, 37 hostages, most of them elderly, were freed. In December 2015, 50 more were released, including 25 on Christmas Day.  

On Feb. 22, 2016, one year after the kidnapping, most of the remaining hostages were released. On March 28, 2016, the last captive, an Assyrian girl named Miriam David Talya, was freed. The group had set aside some young women to be forcibly married to ISIS fighters; one of them was taken away and never found but all the others were eventually released. 

The price was steep — not so much in whatever may have exchanged hands, but in lives lost, the psychological trauma endured by the survivors, and the destruction of entire communities. At the start of the Syrian Civil War, the Khabur villages were home to 20,000 Assyrian Christians; today, only a few hundred remain. The villages are now either abandoned or occupied by Kurdish refugees displaced by fighting elsewhere in Syria.  

Nearly all of these Assyrians have fled the country. Many have resettled in Australia, Germany or Sweden, while others have found refuge in Norway, Austria, Belgium, Russia, the United States, Canada and New Zealand.  

A decade later, al-Jeloo asks, “What could I say about such a tragedy?” 

Five hostages were lost — three of them murdered — but 221 were saved, plucked from the raging fire. It remains both a profound tragedy and an agonizing triumph.