NEW YORK – Atrocities by Syrian jihadist rebels have reached sensational new levels, according to a revered nun working with persecuted Christians and an explosive new video report.

Sister Hatune Dogan told WND in a Skype interview that members of the Syrian opposition are draining the blood of Christians they behead and selling vials to Islamic radicals for $100,000 a piece.

The Syrian Orthodox nun explained that the blood is used in a ritual washing of hands in the belief the act atones for sins and provides privileged access to heaven.

The Christians, she said, are beheaded in ceremonies in which they are forced to kneel, with their hands and feet bound, as the Muslim radicals read a death sentence imposed because the victim refuses to renounce Christianity and embrace Islam.

She detailed how the head of the victim is brutally severed with knives. The blood spurting from their necks is captured in basins and then bottled.

“The Muslims sever the necks and collect the blood in vessels to sell the blood. The Muslims believe that if they kill a Christian and wash their hands in the blood of the Christian, they will go to heaven,” she explained.

She said the sale of the Christian blood “is a big business.”

“With this money, the Muslim terrorists can buy more weapons,” she explained.

Walid Shoebat, a native Arabic-speaking Christian who was a member of the PLO, has called Hatune a Mother Teresa figure in an article that featured her presenting the results of an independent investigation of Christians in Syria under the rule of Muslim fundamentalists.

A video posted on YouTube shows Hatune presenting the results of the investigation in which she discusses how women held captive by Muslims for ransom have been raped and mutilated. She also presents evidence for her claim Muslims are beheading Christians and selling their blood.

See Sister Hatune’s presentation of her findings:

“Hatune’s willingness to help the persecuted is so immense that it surpasses what anyone is doing today in the Middle East,” Shoebat has written on his blog.

“Her righteous deeds, of course, receive the vociferous wrath of the jihadists,” Shoebat said.

The nun says she gets “18 death threats in seven languages.”

“But Sister Hatune is no pacifist,” Shoebat writes. “As she ardently believes in denying one’s self, helping the oppressed and turning the other cheek, like a true warrior, she as well zealously believes in taking up a whip and driving out the wicked.”

Independently, Shoebat has published a video of Sunni Muslims playing soccer with the heads of the people they murdered.

WND Middle East correspondent Michael Maloof, a former senior security policy analyst in the office of the secretary of defense, said the “vociferous wrath” from jihadists that Hatune is receiving because of her vigorous effort to protect Christians has made her a prime target of al-Qaida and its affiliate, the Jabhat al-Nusra.

“Al-Nusra, which wants to establish caliphates in Syria and throughout the Middle East, has amply demonstrated that it will kill any ‘infidel,’ even Muslims, who do not subscribe to a strict form of Shariah,” Maloof said. “This places all Christians and other minorities in peril which, in turn, puts Sister Hatune and her companions in al-Nusra’s crosshairs.”

Hatune explained to WND that she was born into a Christian family in Zaz, a village in Turabdeen, Northern Mesopotamia in Turkey, at a time when Christians were being persecuted by both by Turkish and Kurdish Muslims.

According to a biography, her family migrated from Turkey to Germany in 1985 to escape persecution.

She completed her education in Germany. In 1988, she joined the Morephrem Monastery in Losser, Holland, where she entered the sisterhood under the leadership of the Mother Superior Seyde Atto.

In Germany, she completed her degree in practical theology at the Theological Seminar in Mienz, Germany, in 1996. Later, she worked as a psychotherapist in Kathekese Psychotherapy Institute in Augustburg, Germany.

She has visited 38 countries and worked in the Ministry of Charitable and Social Service in Turkey, Africa, India and the Middle East.

She is a member of the Universal Syrian Orthodox Church under the Holy See of Antioch.

Hatune is the founder of the Sister Hatune Foundation, registered in the United States in New York. The foundation has a Facebook page. Her various country-specific Internet websites are frequently hacked and often inoperable.

Shoebat has begun accepting contributions through a foundation he created for Hatune, RescueChristians.org.

SOURCE: WND News