‘We Are Prepared to Die Here and Now’: See What Happened When an 80-Year-Old Christian Refused to Convert to Islam

06 Oct, 2014 by Cassy Fiano

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Would you have the courage and the conviction to die for what you believed in? One 80-year-old woman did, and her harrowing story will both scare and inspire you.

The woman, identified by her first name only, Victoria, said that she only realized the Islamic State group had taken over her town of Caramles when she went to church one morning as she does every day, but found it locked.

Victoria, a Chaldean Catholic widow, shared her story with the Catholic Herald which was covering a visit to Irbil in Iraq of the U.K.-based Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need.

“Prayer sustained us,” Victoria said of the first four days after the Islamic State takeover when she and one of the other dozen Christians who stayed behind locked themselves in their home.

… “You must convert,” Victoria recalled the men telling the dozen Christians left in town. “Our faith can promise you Paradise.”

Victoria and her neighbor Gazella said they would not convert.

“We believe that if we show love and kindness, forgiveness and mercy we can bring about the kingdom of God on earth as well as in heaven. Paradise is about love. If you want to kill us for our faith then we are prepared to die here and now,” Victoria replied to the militants, as she later told the Catholic Herald.

Miraculously, the jihadists let the group – which included other elderly and ailing Christians – free.

It is a miracle that this courageous woman was not killed. But we must never forget that countless other Christians are being massacred in a brutal, unacceptable genocide, and that Victoria was the exception, not the rule.