by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) - Causing alarm that soon there will soon be nothing left of Iraq’s historic Christian community, more than million Christians have now left the country due to war, persecution, government corruption, and unemployment, the Catholic Register reports. There are now just some 150,000 Christians in Iraq, compared to around 1.5 million in 2003.
The Christians of Iraq are believed to be one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world: the majority are indigenous Eastern Aramaic-speaking ethnic Assyrians who descend from ancient Assyria, and follow the Syriac Christian tradition. The remainder are Armenian Catholic, Armenian Apostolic, Anglican and other Protestants and evangelicals.
Although they have been violently persecuted down the centuries, most recently Iraqi Christians have been subjected to murder, torture, and displacement at the hands of Sunni Islamist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS: the 2003 Iraq war drove great numbers of Christians out of their homes and into the semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region or to other countries. However, even as this war has died down somewhat, Iraqi Christians face ongoing discrimination from Islamic authorities as well as from terrorist elements.
In a Jan.10 statement, Cardinal Louis Sako, whose official position as the patriarch of the Chaldean Church in Iraq was revoked by the Iraqi government in July 2023, said: “More than a million Christians have emigrated. Most of them were with qualified scientific, economic and skilled backgrounds, but who cares?”
“Attacks on Christians are still continuing — on their skills, their jobs, the seizure of their properties, we have documented examples,” Sako wrote. “Cases of forced conversion by ISIS or others, the Islamization of minors, failure to preserve their rights, an attempt to deliberately erase their heritage, history, religious legacy, expressions of hatred in some religious discourses as well as in education books.”