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Iraq Church Horror Speeds Christian Exodus

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  • Iraq Church Horror Speeds Christian Exodus

    IRAQ CHURCH HORROR SPEEDS CHRISTIAN EXODUS

    United Press International UPI
    http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Special/2010/11/01/Iraq-church-horror-speeds-Christian-exodus/UPI-60831288638825/
    Nov 1 2010
    BAGHDAD

    The slaughter of dozens of Iraqi Christians held hostage in a Baghdad
    church seized by Islamist insurgents will accelerate the exodus of
    a Christian community that is one of the most ancient in the world.

    The flight of Iraq's dwindling Christian minority began several years
    ago when they became the target of Islamist militants like al-Qaida.

    Hundreds were killed or driven from their ancestral lands.

    The seizure of the Our Lady of Deliverance church in Baghdad, one of
    the city's main Roman Catholic places of worship, Sunday evening marked
    a sharp escalation in the campaign to drive out Iraq's Christians,
    caught between majority Shiite and minority Sunni Muslims.

    Some 120 people were taken hostage during Sunday services. On Monday,
    Iraqi anti-terrorist forces stormed the church, one of six bombed in
    August 2004.

    Maj. Gen. Hussein Ali Kamal, the deputy interior minister, said at
    least 52 people, including a priest, were killed in the final shootout.

    It wasn't clear whether the captives were killed by militants but
    Christian member of parliament Younadem Kana said, "What we know is
    that most of them were killed when the security forces started to
    storm the church."

    A statement posted on a militant Web site late Sunday, allegedly by
    the Islamic State in Iraq, claimed responsibility for seizing the
    church, which it called "the dirty den of idolatry." ISI is linked
    to al-Qaida in Iraq.

    Iraq's Christian communities -- the Assyrians and Chaldeans, along
    with smaller numbers of Armenians and others -- have practiced their
    faith since the days of Jesus Christ.

    The Assyrian Church of the East, for instance, was established in A.D.

    33 by St. Thomas. The Assyrian Apostolic Church was founded a year
    later and can trace its origins to St. Peter.

    Times were tough under the tyrannical Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, but
    even in 1987 a census listed 1.4 million Christians in Iraq. Today, an
    estimated 700,000 remain, mainly on the Nineveh Plain north of Baghdad.

    As many as 600,000, and probably more, have fled since the insurgency
    erupted following the March 2003 U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam.

    But the trickle became a flood after Islamist extremists began
    systematically car-bombing churches in August 2004 and accusing
    Christians of collaborating with the Americans.

    But Iraq's Christians aren't the only ones on the run. Across the
    Middle East, and indeed in the wider Muslim world as far east as
    Indonesia, Christians are in retreat and often under fire.

    In the West Bank town of Bethlehem, reputed to be Jesus' birthplace,
    Christians once comprised 85 percent of the population. They're now
    20 percent.

    Land belonging to Arab Christians, along with other Palestinians,
    is seized by Israel in the name of security, then handed over to
    Jewish settlers.

    Britain's liberal Guardian newspaper reported Thursday that the
    emigration of Christians from the Middle East "has accelerated in
    the last 15 years to the point where there is a real prospect of
    Christians disappearing from some parts of the cradle of Christianity."

    In Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Jordan and the Arab states in North African
    Christian communities are fighting for survival.

    In Lebanon, where Maronite Catholics were deemed the majority when
    the French left in 1943 and which was the only Arab nation to have
    a Christian head of state, Christians are leaving in droves as the
    Iranian-backed Shiites of Hezbollah grow in power and run a virtual
    state within a state.

    Christians lived in what is now called the Arab world before Islam
    took root in the seventh century. They have survived massacres and
    persecution over the centuries.

    But the demise of secular movements in the region and the growing
    influence of political Islam, as evidenced in its most violent form
    by al-Qaida, is driving out the last remnants.

    "The last prominent Christians -- Tariq Aziz, a Chaldean and Saddam's
    foreign minister for many years, and Hanan Ashrawi, Yasser Arafat's
    education minister -- have vanished from the political stage in the
    Middle East," Der Spiegel recently noted.

    Last week, Iraq's supreme court sentenced Aziz, Saddam's PR man who
    sought to justify his murderous excesses, to be hanged for "his role
    in the elimination of Islamic parties," the majority Shiites.




    From: A. Papazian
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