When the Islamic State (ISIS) invaded the city of Batnaya in Nineveh province, Northern Iraq, in 2014, the militants murdered many of the 6,000 Christians living there, according to The Rebel.
The militants also took many of the women there and turned them into sex slaves, according to The Rebel's Ezra Levant in his video blog.
Some of the residents managed to flee to the nearby region of Kurdistan, where they now live in refugee camps. Some of them hoped to migrate to Canada, but it has not been easy, according to Levant.
Kurdish and Iraqi forces finally liberated Batnaya last year. The liberation forces found out that one of the structures the militants destroyed was the city's lone church, which was burned and the cross on its roof toppled.
Going through the rubble inside the church, Iraqi soldiers found a desecrated Bible written in Aramaic, the language of Jesus and the Chaldean Christians who live in that city.
One of the ISIS militants must have tried to rip it into shreds, but failed because of its thickness. The militant then just fired his gun, drilling a bullet hole through the centre of the Bible.
"A symbolic target — to desecrate the symbol of Christianity; a symbolic murder of Christ himself, perhaps," Levant commented.
The ISIS has made it a point to destroy historic sites that are associated with religious minorities such as Christians, Yazidis, and even Shiite Muslims. Back in 2015, they even released a video showing its militants destroying statues and other priceless relics housed in Mosul's central museum.
Experts believe the ISIS is in pursuit of cultural cleansing in the hopes of dominating the world with their extremist Islamic beliefs. In doing so, they are erasing whatever trace of sectarian coexistence there was in the past.
"The destruction is not just of physical structures – it's the texture of the city and the lives of its different communities," Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, told the L.A. Times.
"The big spectacular events that they showed in the video are basically propaganda, to give the idea that they can act with impunity," added Amr al-Azm, a professor of Middle East history and anthropology at Shawnee State University in Ohio.
