ISIS Terrorist Abandons Jihad After Witnessing 'Love of Christians' at Jordanian Refugee Camp, Aid Group Says

By Stoyan Zaimov, Christian Post Reporter Friday, October 16, 2015

Refugees from Syria at a bus station in Istanbul, Turkey, including a wheelchair-bound man unable to get medical treatment, in this undated photo.

Syrian refugee children drink water at Azraq refugee camp near Al Azraq city, Jordan, August 19, 2015. Azraq is the second largest Syrian refugee camp in Jordan with over 21,000 refugees. according to the United Nations office in Amman.

A Syrian refugee girl walks near her family tent after the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres visited Al Zaatari refugee camp in the Jordanian city of Mafraq, near the border with Syria, January 15, 2015. Syrian refugees in Jordan's main Zaatari refugee camp appealed for help during the last week after a storm buffeted the Middle East region with blizzards, rain and strong winds.

Syrian refugees children warm themselves after a heavy snowstorm at Al Zaatari refugee camp in the Jordanian city of Mafraq, near the border with Syria, February 21, 2015.

A Syrian refugee family warm up at their caravan after heavy rain at the Al Zaatari refugee camp in the Jordanian city of Mafraq, near the border with Syria, December 12, 2013. Weather conditions in the Al Zaatari refugee camp north of Jordan worsened as the country faced winter storms on Thursday. Many tents were flooded and several others were damaged by strong winds and the heavy rains in the camp which is home to 120,000 Syrians who have fled the conflict in their home country.

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Christian Aid Mission has said that Islamic State militants are disguising themselves as refugees at some U.N.-operated refugee camps in Jordan, where they are killing people and selling girls. One such terrorist reportedly abandoned his mission to murder people after seeing the "love of Christians" at the camps.

"The Muslim gangs come as refugees, but they have their agendas," one ministry director, whose name wasn't shared, told the aid group. "They're like a mafia. People are even killed inside the camps, and the refugees are afraid to say if they saw somebody get killed. If you ask them, they'll say, 'I don't know, I was asleep.'"

Millions of people are fleeing Syria and Iraq, looking to escape civil war and IS. Many are presently stationed in neighboring countries, such as Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon, where refugee camps have provided shelter, but not much else, the ministry director said.

"The last time I went inside a camp, I had a policeman with me," he added. "The camps are dangerous because they have IS, Iraqi militias and Syrian militias. It's another place for gangs. They're killing inside the camps, and they're buying and selling ladies and even girls."

An aerial view shows the Zaatari refugee camp, near the Jordanian city of Mafraq, July 18, 2015. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry spent about 40 minutes with half a dozen refugees who vented their frustration at the international community's failure to end Syria's more than two-year-old civil war, while visiting the camp that holds roughly 115,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan about 12 km (eight miles) from the Syrian border. | (Photo: Reuters/Mandel Ngan/Pool)

IS fighters have persecuted religious minorities, including Christians, to a great extent, in many cases forcing them to convert to their version of radical Islam, or be beheaded. The ministry director suggested that the practice continues inside the camps where IS has taken root.

He shared of one story where an IS fighter from northern Syrian came to one of the Jordanian refugee camps with the intention to kill Christian workers — but abandoned his plans after hearing the Gospel and "witnessing the love of the Christians."

"He first saw how Islam brainwashed him about Christianity, and how that contrasted with the reality of what he saw in the Christians," the director said. "And we're talking about an area of Jordan that has three Salafist [a strict, fundamentalist branch of Sunni Islam] mosques. They raise up people to go and fight."

The militant was apparently so enthusiastic about his new faith that the director had to "calm him down," because he began receiving threats from other jihadists who wanted to kill him for converting.

Steve Van Valkenburg, Christian Aid Mission's area director for the Middle East, previously told The Christian Post in September that Christians have an opportunity in the refugee crisis to show the love of Christ and open people's eyes.

"I think that a lot of refugees see that there is something different there, they see the Muslim on Muslim fighting, and then they see how the Christians are reaching out with love and caring — that has to do something with their hearts," Valkenburg told CP.

He added that one thing Christians are showing is that they are not only working with charity, but "we're working with Jesus Christ. We're not working to build an earthly kingdom. I think that has to get the attention of the world."

There have been previous reported cases of IS militants converting to Christianity, such as a story from June where one fighter reportedly experienced a dream of a "man in white," who he said was Jesus.

Gina Fadely, director of Youth With A Mission Frontier Missions, reported the incident back then, and said that the man had confessed to killing a number of Christians, before experiencing the dream and deciding to become a follower of Christ.