Christian women arm themselves in Lebanon, threaten to send ISIS jihadists to hell

Lebanese Christian women threatened to send jihadists to hell as they armed themselves in defiance of the suicide bombing attacks on Monday, June 27.

Women in the Christian village of al-Qaa in the Bekaa Valley near the Syrian border didn't sit around cowering in fear after five died and more than a dozen suffered from injuries in two separate bombing blasts on Monday morning and evening. Instead, they took up arms and threatened to kill the Islamic State jihadists whom they suspect to be behind the attacks.

"We will not allow Lebanon to become a new Iraq. We will not flee, we have weapons and are ready to protect ourselves," said one of the women who spoke in anonymity, as reported by Assyrian campaign group A Demand for Action.

"Jihadists think they go to hell if they are killed by women, we will send them straight to hell," the unnamed woman declared.

Apparently, this belief is well-known among Iraqis and Kurdish people. Two years ago, U.S. Rep. Ed Royce talked about how Iraq recruited women fighters to the Kurdish peshmerga forces to fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) terrorist group. 

"These ISIL soldiers apparently believed that if they were killed in battle, they went to paradise as long as they were killed by a man," Royce told the New York Post in 2014.

In the same report, an unnamed Kurdish woman fighter told Agence France-Presse, "I think [the Islamic State terrorists] were more afraid of us than of the men. They believe they'll go to hell if they die at a woman's hands."