The novelist Zora Neale Hurston described one of her characters as a rut in the road, with “plenty of life below the surface but it was beaten down by the wheels.” Since the fall of Saddam, the Christians of Iraq have been beaten down by every wheel in motion: violence, extortion, and murder. In desperation, Christian religious leaders are now openly criticizing the Iraqi government for failing to protect their flocks. Chaldean archbishop Louis Sako recently lamented in the AsiaNews, “In Iraq Christians are dying, the Church is disappearing under continued persecution, threats and violence [are] carried out by extremists who are leaving us no choice: conversion or exile.”
Twenty years ago the Iraqi Christian population was estimated to be 1.4 million. The Department of State reported there were almost 1 million in early 2003. U.N. sources claim the figure to be 700,000. Two years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, it was estimated that 40 percent of the refugees fleeing Iraq were Christian, deliberately targeted in Iraq. There were 20,000 Christian families living in the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad before the liberation of Iraq. Today, there are only 3,000 families. Most are only partially intact, as members of those families were killed, displaced to other areas in Iraq or fled the country. One in four Christian families living in the major Iraqi cities has left. A religious cleansing is taking place as Muslim extremists either demand that Christians convert to Islam, and send daughters and sisters to convert and marry a Muslim man; or, worse, force families to leave or be killed.
For more: Iraq’s Christian Exodus - Keith Roderick - National Review Online
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