Azerbaijan obliterates church and entire
Christian village in Nagorno-Karabakh
This kind of thing has happened all over what is known as the Islamic world.
Church, Entire Village ‘Erased’ In Azerbaijan’s Recaptured
Nagorno-Karabakh
by Amos Chapple, RFE/RL, April 24, 2024:
A picture of a prayer session inside the St. John the Baptist Church in Nagorno-Karabakh was posted to Twitter by Azerbaijani parliament member Jala Ahmadova in July 2021 to demonstrate what she called an “atmosphere of ethnic and religious tolerance,” after Azerbaijan recaptured Susa, a town known in Armenian as Shushi.
Today that church, built by Armenians in the 19th century, no longer exists.
Images released recently by the monitoring group Caucasus Heritage Watch indicate that the Susa/Shushi church, which was wrapped in scaffolding through much of its time under Azerbaijani control, was demolished in the winter of 2023-24.
Baku retook control of Susa/Shushi from ethnic Armenian forces in November 2020 after launching a war to retake territory internationally recognized as Azerbaijani land.
Two kilometers south of the erased church, satellite images released in April reveal that an entire village appears to have been razed to the ground. Today a large mosque is under construction in the broken soil where a settlement once stood, which was known in Armenian as Karintak and as Dasalti in Azeri.
Husik Ghulyan, a lead researcher at Caucasus Heritage Watch who published the satellite images of Dasalti/Karintak, told RFE/RL, “I think the goal of Azerbaijan in this case was to completely demolish [the settlement] to rebuild a new village for Azerbaijani internally displaced people or other resettlers.”
The researcher said the village’s church, visible to the right of the mosque, “is a legally protected heritage object even by Azerbaijani laws,” which he said, was “probably the reason they left it intact.”
Dasalti/Karintak, which means “under the rock,” in both Azeri and Armenian, takes its name from the massive cliffs that loom above it. The village was the site of several natural springs and had a history of agriculture.
A traveler to the village in the late 1890s described it as a settlement where “the land is fertile, but the crops are scarce and produce little.” Locals, the observer said, “planted wheat, barley, millet, and other crops.” Under Soviet rule the village was home to a silk production plant and a factory making electrical components….
Pakistan: Two bystanders killed as jihad
suicide bomber targets Japanese nationals
“Indeed, Allah has bought from the believers their lives and their wealth, because the garden will be theirs, they will fight in the way of Allah and will kill and be killed.” (Qur’an 9:111)
Five Japanese survive Pakistan suicide bomber and
gunman attack, two bystanders killed
Reuters, April 19, 2024 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
Five Japanese nationals in Pakistan escaped when a suicide bomber detonated their device on Friday, and police shot dead a gunman accompanying the bomber, officials said, adding that two bystanders died from injuries sustained in the incident. No militant group has claimed responsibility for the rare attack on Japanese nationals in Karachi, with Pakistani authorities identifying them as engineers working for the management of an export-processing zone in the port city.
One of the two attackers, who followed the Japanese in their vehicle by motorbike, jumped off when the vehicle slowed down and set off explosives tied to his body but failed to strike his target, Pakistani counter-terrorism official Raja Umar Khatab told reporters. His accomplice then began shooting at the vehicle.
“I think he fired some 15 or 16 shots,” Khatab said, adding that private security guards with the foreigners and a nearby police patrol returned fire and killed the second attacker. The attackers had followed the Japanese group’s vehicle for some time, Khatab said, with authorities suspecting they carried out reconnaissance to identify their target and the location for the attack.
Islamist militants and separatist insurgent groups have been involved in other bloody attacks in the South Asian nation, with some of them targeting foreigners, mainly Chinese nationals….
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