ISIS fighters remove the cross from a church in Iraq-Syria.
ISIS supporters posted a list of Christian Churches to target for attacks this Christmas season.
The list appeared in a recent online post.
Vocativ reported:
A user going by the name of “Abu Marya al-Iraqi” posted an Arabic-language message calling “for bloody celebrations in the Christian New Year” and announced the group’s plans to utilize its network of lone wolf attackers to “turn the Christian New Year into a bloody horror movie.”
The series of messages appeared in a pro-ISIS group on Telegram, which also provides manuals for the use and preparations of weapons and explosives for aspiring assailants. The information, distributed in a number of posts, was all previously available online and includes a public directory of churches across all 50 states. (Vocativ does not publish specific information found in lists like these.)
In another group post, a member summoned “the sons of Islam” to target “churches, well-known hotels, crowded coffee shops, streets, markets and public places,” and shared a list of addresses in the United States, as well as in Canada, France and the Netherlands.
A similar hit list was published in August and included churches and synagogues in New York, Florida, Texas and California.
The Christian Times reported:
The list includes about 15,000 people. And unlike the man who was informed by the FBI, many of those who are included in the list have not been contacted by the FBI.
Some of the names were obtained by Circa, which reported that the terror group published the names on encrypted websites. ISIS plans to have those people, mainly from Texas, New York, California and Florida, killed by “sleeper cells or lone wolves.”
ISIS released a similar list of targeted churches in July.
