Posted on 12/23/2006 7:09:57 PM PST by blam
'Leave, crusaders, or have your heads cut off'
By Aqeel Hussein in Mosul and Colin Freeman, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:37am GMT 24/12/2006
The snow has already settled on the mountains further north, but the Christians of the Iraqi city of Mosul are scared to put festive decorations outside their homes this year. Their ancestors settled here in the 1st century AD, yet as teacher Jamal Fadi has discovered, some of their Muslim neighbours want this Christmas to be their last.
Death threat: This letter was delivered with two bullets
"A letter was delivered to my door with two bullets placed on top of it," said Mr Fadi, 32, standing watchfully in the neat garden of his two-storey villa. "It said: 'Leave, crusaders, or we will cut your heads off.' They want us to go from Mosul completely."
After months as a nervous bystander to the spiralling civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims, Iraq's Christian minority now faces the spectre of sectarian violence coming to their traditional home city. They fear that al Qaeda-backed zealots within the Sunni community, which forms the bulk of Mosul's one million population, want to end nearly 1,500 years of co-existence with an onslaught of ethnic cleansing.
Residents say that the campaign, which they claim has intensified in recent weeks, is prompted by Sunni fears of a complete Shia takeover of Baghdad in coming years. In response, Mosul would be turned into a northern capital for a Sunni-dominated enclave, which would include Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit and stretch south to the anti-American towns of Fallujah and Ramadi.
The fact that no such blueprint has been endorsed by the Iraqi government is of little comfort to Christians. The plan's architects, they fear, are capable of enforcing it themselves through threats and indoctrination alone. For proof, they say, look no further than playgrounds, where Christian and Sunni Muslim children have played together for decades.
"Our children are told by other pupils that they are 'f***ing spies' who have brought the Christian occupation to Iraq," said Father Shamoun Butris, a Christian minister in Mosul. "It is not true, but makes no -difference."
Iraq's Christian community is made up of Eastern Rite Chaldean Catholics and Assyrian Orthodox Christians, and numbered around one million, or five per cent of the population, before the US-led invasion. Traditionally well-educated, they won respect in a Muslim land by specialising in teaching, academia and medicine, which earned them protected status under Saddam Hussein. Since his fall, those blessings have turned to curses. Their well-paid jobs have made them targets for kidnappers, while their grasp of English has fuelled suspicions that they work as translators for the US Army. In the past three years, 200,000 have fled abroad.
So far, save for a few brief but bloody car-bombings against Christian churches, they have at least escaped the mass pogroms of the kind being meted out to each other by Sunnis and Shias. Now, however, they sense the start of a systematic campaign. Anxiety has been fuelled by reports in Mosul of Christian women being told to stop wearing Western clothes.
Muslim leaders deny such claims. Yet the more hard-line clerics make clear that they no longer see Christians as part of Mosul's future. "We want an Islamic society, and the Christians should leave because they follow the occupiers' religion," said Saad al Jibouri, from the Sunni Al Rahma mosque. "We did not force them to leave, nor did we kill any of them."
With talk now growing of partitioning Iraq into federal states for Sunni, Shias and Kurds, some Iraqi Christians want their own, autonomous zone in an area west of Mosul. But the plan has little chance of success with the Iraqi government, and with about half of their number still resident 250 miles away in Baghdad, it has limited support among Christians themselves.
Despite feeling vulnerable, many Christians are reluctant to complain. Canon Andrew White, a British clergyman based in the Green Zone who administers to a 1,000-strong congregation at St George's Anglican Church in Baghdad, said: "Christians keep stressing to me that they do not want to over-emphasise what they are going through for fear of it escalating. But things are bad."
For some in Mosul, there is bewilderment at why the West – with its powerful Christian figures in George W Bush, Tony Blair and Pope Benedict XVI – cannot help. Among them is Firaz Adis, 51, who will pass this Christmas without his son Ricot, kidnapped from Mosul University four months ago. "I paid a ransom of $10,000 but they killed my son anyway," he sobbed. "They said 'This will keep happening as long as you are agents of the occupiers'. I ask all the Christians in the world: 'Please help us'."
review
Send every Christian in iraq and Blackhawk and a pilot and crew to fly it.
Matthew 2
17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
18"A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more."[a]
"Leave, crusaders, or have your heads cut off".
tsk,tsk,tsk. Typical jihadanazi statement.
They've said and done this so much over the centuries, it's become a very old and very stale cliche.
Not real brilliant minds are they?
Appeasement only makes the enemy stronger. Never negotiate with evil.
Oh, man. I knew Christians in Iraq still didn't exactly live an easy life, but I didn't think it'd be THAT bad!
I'll pray for them.
The only good Muslim ....
If this is not a reason to give Christians in the Middle East religious asylum in the US, then I don't know what is.
Take immigration visas away from Muslims and give to the Christians. I bet they make better and certainly more trustworthy citizens than what we have experienced from the Muslims.
Yet, these Islamic lunatics wonder why the "welcome" mat is being burned and Islamists being regarded as the turd in an Easter Basket.....
No matter how hard one tries -- that turd will not become chocolate.
Semper Fi
None of this will change, or even begin to change - until we have a President and Congress who will CORRECTLY identify the enemy and conduct war against that enemy....
The enemy is NOT terrorism, it is not Muslim terrorism...
The enemy is militant Islam -- and terrorism is simply their chosen strategy, because in a war between Islamist nations and the West the world of Islam would become extinct...
Our government is protecting militant Islam by the very fact they refuse to identify militant Islam as the enemy..
The war on "terror" is a farce, since the SOURCE and sustenance of the terrorists is hiding in political sanctuaries.....guarded by our politicians...
Semper Fi
Take immigration visas away from Muslims and give to the Christians. I bet they make better and certainly more trustworthy citizens than what we have experienced from the Muslims.
They should leave, and deliver their own message when the last one is safe: "Islam is self-destructive, and we are patient. We'll be back."
religion of peace
What was George Bush thinking when he got us stuck in this quagmire? The neocon theory that we could make Iraq into a democracy is even more a pipedream than LBJ's Great Society.
Honestly, I believe they cared more about transforming Iraq into a series of airbases.
Perhaps...but that isn't the way he sold it.
I reserve the right to be skeptical of politicians, regardless of party.
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