ERBIL, Iraqi Kurdistan: As more Christians are displaced from their homes in Iraq, they believe some groups and international intelligence services are masterminding a "plot" to drive them out of the country, just as with the forced expulsion of the Jewish minority in the past.
Iraqi Christians have recently come under a new wave of attacks in Baghdad and other violent parts of the country, causing many of them to migrate to the much safer Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq or to live abroad.
Johnson Siyawash Eyo, deputy head of the National Chaldean-Siryac-Assyrian Council, says that, out of the 1.5 million Christians that lived in Iraq until the 1990s, only 450,000 now remain in the country.
"Some parties who have an incorrect understanding of Christians have a plot to eradicate Iraq of its Christians," Eyo said.
He expressed fears that Iraq's Christian population might share the same fate as the Iraqi Jews of the middle of the last century who numbered in the tens of thousands and are now almost invisible....
He accused several international bodies, in cooperation with various countries' intelligence agencies, of "trying to eradicate the Christians in the Middle East. They have started with Iraq but if their project succeeds in Iraq, they will continue with other countries [in the region]."
Eyo said that, instead of granting asylum to Christian refugees, Western governments should send funds to Christians in Iraq "to make them politically and economically stronger."
Iraq's Christian population stood at around 149,000 after the 1947 census, roughly 3.7 percent of the country's population. In 1987, there were around one million Christians in Iraq out of a population of 18.5 million people, over 5 percent of the population. But now the number of Christians is estimated at under half a million....
Luay Matta, an advisor to Emmanuel Delly, the Patriarch of Babylon of the Chaldean Catholics, for instance, was unhesitant to accuse al-Qaeda of trying to "eliminate Iraq's Christians."
"But we don't know if this is backed by other regional parties or just by al Qaeda and other extremist groups," Matta said. Read more at www.jihadwatch.org |
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