“Jesus said, Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake.” – Matthew 24:9
“When he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held.” – Revelation 6:9 & 20:4
BREITBART.com reports: Kurdish news outlet Rudaw estimated in a report published Thursday that the southern Iraqi city of Basra lost 80 percent of its Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syriac Christians in the past two decades as a result of extreme persecution by jihadist groups.
Christians are indigenous to Iraq and have lived in substantial numbers in the country for two millennia. Despite this, and especially in the past 20 years, the community’s numbers have collapsed dramatically – first as a result of violence erupting following the American invasion in 2001, then escalating under the assault of the Islamic State “caliphate’s” genocide from 2014 to 2017.
Today, nearly 7 years after the fall of the “caliphate,” Iran-backed jihadist militias pose a significant threat to both Christian communities in the south and those who fled persecution and moved to the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).
The government of Iran itself also poses a threat to the KRG, where many Christians have resettled. The Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) bombed Erbil, the capital of the KRG, in mid-January, destroying a local residence and killing most of the family residing there, including a child ten days shy of her first birthday.
“There are threats. That is why Christians migrate,” Aram Sabah, head of the Chaldean Archdiocese of Basra and southern Iraq, told Rudaw, describing Christians as taking any “opportunity” to find safety.
“There are many reasons that lead to Christian migration. When there is a weak law in place, or your rights are not given and you are considered a third-class citizen, you will migrate abroad whenever you see an opportunity,” Sabah explained. “It hurts us a lot. A large number of Christians have migrated due to threats to their lives, marginalization, lack of rights, insults, and even death threats.”
According to Rudaw, the Christian population of Basra has diminished from 7,000 families to 350 in recent memory. The region’s churches “lie empty,” many of them shuttered permanently.
The Christian population has dropped rapidly in the past decade. Five years ago, the Christian aid group Aid to the Church in Need published a report in which it found that Iraq’s total Christian population dropped by 90 percent in the 20 years immediately preceding the study. Mosul, the ISIS “capital,” lost 99 percent of its Christians – 40 people.
“Christians had numbered 1.5 million before 2003 and yet by summer 2019, Christians in Iraq were ‘well below’ 150,000 and perhaps even ‘below 120,000.’ This means that, within a generation, Iraq’s Christian population has shrunk by more than 90 percent,” the report read… (Continue reading)
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