Pope Francis on Monday castigated the Islamic State barbarians who beheaded 21 Coptic Christians purely for their religious beliefs — and he called the victims “martyrs” whose blood “is a testimony which cries out to be heard.”
“Their only words were: ‘Jesus, help me,’ ” the sickened pontiff said. “They were killed simply for the fact that they were Christians.”
The pope’s unusually strong words came less than 24 hours after the Islamic State released a horrific, 5-minute video of the bloody executions on a rocky beach in Libya.
“The blood of our Christian brothers and sisters is a testimony that cries out to be heard,” Francis said in his native Spanish to a delegation from the Church of Scotland in Vatican City.
“It makes no difference whether they be they Catholics, Orthodox, Copts or Protestants. They are Christians!”
He also said, “The martyrs belong to all Christians.”
Near the end of the video released Sunday, a masked killer who spoke to the camera in English used a bloody hand to point his knife across the Mediterranean Sea toward Italy.
“And we will conquer Rome by Allah’s permission, the promise of our prophet, peace be upon him,” he said.
In other developments Monday:
- Italy was considering sending 5,000 troops to battle the Islamic State in Libya, a day after shuttering its embassy in the capital city of Tripoli and urging Italian nationals to flee the country. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said “the [troop] proposal is to wait, so the UN Security Council can work with a bit more conviction.”
- As many as 35 more Egyptians, many of them farm workers, were missing and presumed to have been kidnapped from areas in Libya controlled by the ISIS, according to a report by the Libya Herald website.
- The abductions followed waves of airstrikes by the Egyptian military on suspected Islamic State strongholds in the eastern Libyan city of Darna. “Let those far and near know that Egyptians have a shield to protect and safeguard the security of the country and a sword the cuts off terrorism,” the Egyptian military said in a statement read on state radio.
- New York Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan told The Post the mass execution “threatens civilization itself.”
“They were beheaded for nothing less than their religious convictions. It moves me to prayers. It moves me to tears,” Dolan said. “There’s a coordinated effort on behalf of fanatics to see that religion that stands for friendship and peace is stamped out.” - A new poll revealed that 57 percent of Americans disapprove of how President Obama is handling ISIS, which he once likened to a “JV team” of terrorists. The finding marked a significant increase from the 49 percent that was unhappy with Obama’s response in September, according to CNN.
In a statement released Sunday night, the White House said the “heinous act” shown on the Islamic State video “once again underscores the urgent need for a political resolution to the conflict in Libya.”
But the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said: “Leaving things in Libya as they are without decisive intervention to suppress these terror groups constitutes a clear danger to international peace and security.”
Grieving relatives of some victims gathered Monday at a church in the Egyptian village of el-Aour, where Babawi Walham said he saw his brother Samuel, 30, in the grisly video.
“My heart stopped beating. I felt what he felt,” said Walham, his eyes swollen from crying.
Pope Francis phoned the patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Pope Tawadros II, to “express his profound participation with the pain of the Coptic Church for the recent barbaric assassination of Coptic Christians by Islamic fundamentalists,” a Vatican spokesman said.
“He assured him of his prayers and tomorrow, during the funerals of the victims, he will be united in spirit with the prayer and the pain of the Coptic Church,” spokesman Federico Lombardi added.
The 21 victims were primarily poor, Egyptian men who went to Libya looking for work and were kidnapped from the coastal city of Sirte in December and January.
With Post Wires