Like so many other horrific accounts of Christian persecution in Iraq, this story went unnoticed in the West…
Since the invasion of Iraq, militants have bombed 28 churches and murdered hundreds of Christians.
The latest report by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that two million Iraqis have fled since the invasion, and almost a third of these are Assyrian – who are down from 1.4 million in Saddam’s Iraq to fewer than 500,000 today.
Now, while one of the world’s oldest Christian nations faces extinction at the hands of Islamic extremists, the West does nothing.
Ed West We must not let this ancient Church slide into oblivion.
Christians of Iraq includes the Minority Right Group Report Assimilation, Exodus, Eradication: Iraq’s minority communities since 2003
(PDF)
The communities covered in this report make up about 10 per cent of the Iraqi population. They include Armenians, Bahá’ís, Chaldo-Assyrians, Faili Kurds, Jews, Mandaeans, Palestinians, Shabaks, Turkomans and Yazidis. Many of these groups have lived in Iraq for two millennia or more. Though they have survived a long history of persecution that goes back far beyond Saddam Hussein’s rule, there is a real risk that they might not survive the current conflict. Because they are caught up in violence between the majority Sunni Arab, Shia Arab and Sunni Kurdish groups, and are also specifically targeted for atrocities, assimilation or mass displacement and exodus, some may now be facing total eradication from this ancient land. These communities are invisible in the eyes of the world.
