The double-page photo in the April issue of Sojourners magazine came as a surprise to me: a photo of protesters in front of the capitol if the ISIS headquarters building in Raqqa, Syria. The author tells the story of Soaad Nofal, a Muslim schoolteacher, and hundreds of followers who have staged daily vigils outside the ISIS headquarters as part of the movement of nonviolent resistance against ISIS brutality. The result was that a “small number of activists were released.”
The article also reports that in July 2014, when members of the ISIS battalion tasked with destroying, among others, the Crooked Minaret, “the residents living nearby formed a human chain to protect it. They warned the fighters that they would need to kill them if they wanted to blow up the mosque. The militants backed down and left.”