SAN JOSE -- As their embattled fellow Assyrians in Syria are being held hostage and seeing their villages taken over by Islamic State fighters, local expats in San Jose gathered Friday night for a prayer vigil to offer spiritual support and call for the United States to come to their rescue. "We pray for the safety of our fellow Assyrians," said Father Lawrence Namato with the Assyrian Church of the East where an estimated 100 people showed up for the vigil. He spoke earlier Friday with the church's relief agency and learned that more than 1,000 families had been displaced from their homes this week when ISIS fighters attacked, taking about 250 men, women and children hostage. "Hundreds have run out of their homes heading north to Turkey, but they're still in an area controlled by ISIS," Namato said. "And we really don't know how to reach them." The reports coming out of Syria all week have been horrifying. As rampaging ISIS fighters lashed out against the Assyrians, one of the world's oldest Christian communities, villages in the northeast corner of the country have been destroyed and hundreds of people have been taken prisoner or quickly forced into slavery. Meanwhile, the fighters have destroyed irreplaceable pieces of art and in some cases begun to levy a tax, payable in gold, on religious minorities. As of Friday morning, Assyrian leaders said 287 people had been taken captive, including 30 children and several dozen women. Namato, who was born in Kirkuk, Iraq, has led the San Jose congregation for six years. He said its more than 500 families are part of a larger Assyrian community in the San Francisco Bay Area that numbers well over 6,000. Assyrians have been drawn to the region for decades, said Namato, with an early Assyrian church created in San Francisco in the 1930s. Namato said his parish was established 35 years ago and that "at one point in the 70s the patriarch of our church lived in San Jose." One local Assyrian attending the prayer vigil was Thuraieh Khayou, a research association for Gilead Sciences in Foster City, where she commutes each Monday from her home in Turlock. She said her mother and father both came from small villages in the area now under attack by ISIS. "First, the fighters started taking over the smaller villages around the main city of Qamishli," she said, referring to the regional capital of nearly 200,000 people about 420 miles northeast of Damascus. "My parents are here, but my mom's uncle and my first cousins and other relatives have been affected by what's happening right now." Khayou said the brutal attacks on her homeland are even more painful because "everyone in these towns feels like a relative, even if they're not. You feel like one family. And while my immediate relatives were able to flee, some who are married to people in other towns were actually captured along with their kids." Khayou added that she didn't want to "release their names because we fear for their lives, but I'm in touch with family members by phone and they keep me updated constantly, because things can change within hours or even minutes." Khayou called on the United States government to do whatever it can to help save her people. "These fighters are just puppets; we need to stop their bosses," she said, referring to financial support ISIS reportedly gets from the government of Qatar, an ally of the United States. And she called on the US to pressure Turkey to seal its border with Syria. "ISIS recruits are coming in with weapons from Turkey and Turkey is looking the other way," said Khayou. "Nothing will stop until you stop these outsiders from entering Syria from Turkey. If you don't, these attacks on our people will go on and on."