Posted on 07/26/2006 9:31:27 AM PDT by OrthodoxPresbyterian
by Glen Chancy
July 24, 2006
Christians of Iraq.Com
The news from Iraq has been especially grim of late. Daily it seems violent death is everywhere in the form of car bombings at mosques and other public facilities, ethnic cleansing carried out by militias roving about the streets seeking victims, even soldiers and police doubling as sectarian enforcers. The statistics themselves tell a grim tale. Baghdad's morgue is receiving nearly twice as many dead Iraqis each day as it did last year. In June 2005, the Baghdad morgue was receiving 700 to 800 bodies a month, or an average of between 24 to 26 a day. In July of 2006, this number has shot up to an astounding 50.
This increase in the death toll is happening despite two events that were supposed to reduce the level of violence. First, almost 100,000 new U.S.-trained troops have been added since last year. Second, the U.S. military has an ongoing security "clampdown" in Baghdad designed to reign in the violence in the capital. Unfortunately, both the new troops and the "clampdown" have failed so blatantly, that even the US military was forced to admit that the level of violence in Baghdad has been hardly unaffected by its efforts.
Of course, the carnage is not limited to Bagdad alone. Nationwide, the situation is hardly any better. The United Nations mission in Baghdad recently reported that 2,669 civilians were killed across Iraq during May and 3,149 were killed in June. In total, 14,338 civilians were killed from January to June 2006.
Life across Iraq in the midst of growing sectarian violence is only becoming more dangerous for Iraqi civilians. Sunni insurgent attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces have been increasing at an alarming rate. Attacks on American and Iraqi troops in June 2006 grew 44 percent from 88 from 61 compared to June 2005. While the number of American troops killed by hostile fire has declined, life is just as dangerous for them as it has ever been in post-Saddam Iraq.
All of this violence and mayhem is tearing the country apart at an increasing rate. In Baghdad, the Tigris river has become a dividing line between the Sunni west and Shiite east. This divide is stranding many of the city's seven million on the "wrong"; side, making even their daily trips outside for shopping or to work into dangerous missions in enemy territory. To stay alive, many Iraqis have turned to fake IDs that can be used to fool sectarian militias out hunting for victims. For $35, those with easily identifiable sectarian names can get false documents that might mean the difference between life and death on an Iraqi street.
Other Iraqis have simply packed up and fled religiously mixed areas for what they hope will be safer ground among their co-religionists. The number of Iraqis who have registered for assistance as refugees within Iraq since the 22 February bombing of a Shiite shrine at Samarra stands at 162,000 people. Many of them live in 11 new tent camps. They include Abd Hammad al-Saeidi, who said that, "Gunmen told us to leave or they would kill us." The farmer from just south of Baghdad now lives with his family of 11 in a tent.
Obviously then, Iraq is rapidly becoming a nation of refugees. Sunnis and other minorities are leaving the south, while Shiites have been fleeing the areas around Baghdad and the north. For both the Sunni and Shia civilians caught in this cauldron of violence, the situation is tragic beyond description. However, as bad as things have been for Muslim Iraqis, for one vulnerable group of Iraqis, life inside "free" Iraq has been even more difficult. For the Assyrians, who are both Christian and the indigenous people of Iraq, the aftermath of Iraq's "liberation" has been downright catastrophic.
The Assyrian Christian population of Iraq has been brutalized by both ethnic and religious attacks since the US-led invasion in 2003. Glyn Ford, a UK Labor member of the European Parliament and member of the "Save the Assyrians" campaign, recently laid out a litany of woe that has befallen the Assyrians. Ford reports that torture, kidnapping, extortion, harassment, church bombings, forced religious conversion, political disenfranchisement and property destruction are just some of the deliberate human rights violations that are both ruining and taking the lives of Assyrians in Iraq.
The President of "Save the Assyrians", Andy Darmoo, told a news conference in New York: "Today, the situation is the worst we have ever lived in Iraq."
Christians accounted for somewhere between five and twelve percent of the pre-war Iraqi population of 26 million. Most Iraqi Christians are Assyrians whose native language is a form of Aramaic. Over half of the Assyrian Iraqi community resides in the north, primarily in the Nineveh Plains and its surrounding areas. This location puts them at the mercy of America's allies, the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), which has been anything but kind to the Assyrians.
Shamiran Mako, an analyst with the Council for Assyrian Research and Development (CARD), a Canadian-based think-tank, told the IPS that since the "liberation" of Iraq, oppression has become more prevalent in the North.
Recently, there have been systematic measures taken by the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) officials, under the Kurdish-controlled areas to marginalise and suppress Assyrians through the dictatorial policies of the KRG.
The remaining Assyrians living elsewhere in Iraq have faired little better, of course, as they have been frequently targeted by the insurgency, by religious extremists, and even by criminal gangs bent on earning ransom money. As Halfath Hamama, an Iraqi refugee who fled to Syria explained, "Our children, wives, and family members are kidnapped every day. They send us a note telling us to give them fifty thousand dollars or they will kill our family. They send us their fingers or toes, pictures of them beaten and bruised, and tell us we bring this on our head because we are Christians and collaborate with the Christian Americans."
Anecdotal evidence aside, one must turn to the hard numbers to get the true measure of the Christian catastrophe unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Statistics from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in October 2005 show that around 700,000 Iraqis took refuge in Syria alone between October 2003 and March 2005. Of this number, fully 36 percent were Iraqi Christians, an astounding rate given their small percentage of the overall population of Iraq.
In total, over 250,000 Christian refugees are now stranded in Syria, Jordan and Turkey. This is not even counting those that are displaced within Iraq itself, many having fled north trying to find some measure of safety among other Assyrians. Despite the scale, however, of this human tragedy, the Assyrians have largely been left to their own devices.
While the Kurds, for example, have received millions of dollars in aid following the end of Saddam's regime, aid to the Assyrians has been almost non-existent. This has resulted in many refugees living in appalling conditions. It was even recently reported that some of the Assyrian refugees in northern Iraq had been reduced to sleeping on bare dirt in Christian cemeteries.
Since 2005, the Council for Assyrian Research and Development has sought to record the abuses endured by Assyrians through the Assyrian Human Rights Documentation Project. The first outcome paper produced by the group pulls no punches in its grim assessment. The paper warns, "At the current rates of ethnic cleansing, forced assimilation and migration, the indigenous Assyrian Christians will be fully eradicated from the new 'democratic Iraq' in less than 10 years... the Kurdification, Arabisation, and Islamification of Iraq have left an ancient people at the doors of extinction."
The Assyrians have been calling for assistance, and these pleas have largely fallen on deaf ears. What is most needed is an Assyrian Administrative Unit, a safe haven that would be administered and guarded by the Assyrians themselves. While international groups such as the European Parliament have issued declarations and resolutions of support, the actual power in Iraq, the United States, appears to have already relegated the Assyrians to the dustbin of history. Unless the American people themselves choose to demand a policy reversal, it is unlikely that the Bush Administration will become interested in the fate of Iraqi Christians on its own accord.
It is doubtful that George W. Bush will be remembered as the American President who brought Jeffersonian Democracy to the Middle East. But it appears that at least one historic achievement is well within his grasp. It is quite likely that "W" will succeed where the Arab Caliphate, the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire, British colonialism, and decades of Ba'athist misrule all failed: When "W" finally saunters off the world stage... the Assyrian Christian community in Iraq will probably be gone as well.
And the world will be a much poorer place because of it.
I never said that I wasn't in favor of knocking these others off.
My personal opinion is that we should already have overthrown Iran, and that NK should have been well on it's way to a takedown.
Iran is simply another of the nations that aided and abetted the 9/11 terrorists (al qaeda.)
Well...
I would suggest we start pulling American troops out of Iraq immediately. The accusation that a Christian is a "Collaborator with the Foreign Occupation" holds at least a bit less water if... there isn't any Foreign Occupation.
While our own US Government has never been able to prove that Salman Pak was used to train the 9/11 hijackers, the theory (which is at least plausible) has never been disproven, either. Suffice it to say there are conflicting claims; and while I don't really care much about UN resolutions, Saddam needed to terminate all ties to terrorism as of 9/11 to comply with the "with us or against us" doctrine. Turning over Abu Nidal on September 12, 2001 would have been a good start, for example.
So, assuming that saving a few tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars by secretly overturning Executive Order 12333 and assassinating Saddam & Sons would not have worked, let's say (for the sake of argument) we had "Just War" cause for a full-scale military invasion.
OKAY, so we went after Saddam Hussein. Invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003, declared "Mission Accomplished" on May 1, 2003, and captured Hussein on December 14, 2003.
That was over two years ago, now.
So, then, the question is: Of the factions vying for power in post-Saddam Iraq, whom do we support?
Or, to put it another way.... Given the above Choices, how does the US occupation AVOID supporting "the Bad Guys" (considering that they're ALL "the Bad Guys")??
No matter which faction we support, they'll be targeted as "collaborators" by the others; and the Christians will be targeted as "collaborators" by all of them.
Once the US troop presence is removed from the equation, the Iraqi Christians make less obvious scapegoats -- the Christians aren't in contention for dominance of post-war Iraq, and don't want to be; so, if you can't get propaganda value from tying them to the American Occupation, there's not as much tactical or PR "value" in killing weak little Christians when other, powerful enemy Islamic factions are vying for power. So, let the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shi'ites fight it out amongst themselves... ideally, of course, I'd prefer they not kill anybody; but if they're going to kill somebody (and, being Muslim, they are), I'd prefer it to be eachother rather than the local Assyrian Presbyterian pastor.
Beyond that, US Churches can send Prayers and Money to the Assyrian Churches; but that's a job for the Church, not the State. I think that US Troops did about the best job they could as of December 14, 2003 -- and two-and-a-half years later we are now, militarily, hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousand of lives way, way, way past the point of diminishing returns.
IMHO.
Best, OP
OTOH, I'm delighted with Alito (well, as compared to most of the USSC, anyway). It's almost as if George W. Bush, in spite of himself, managed to for once not screw over his Christian base on a critical issue.
Between Alito and Roberts (I'm less confident of Roberts, but whatkinyado) I'd almost be willing to forgive Bush, say, a trillion dollars in deficit spending (aren't I generous with taxpayer moolah). Unfortunately, Bush has several trillions of debt beyond merely the one to answer for, and the US Creditors holding those debts won't be "forgiving" any of them.
Oh, well
I doubt if we have the power to take on North Korea, Iran, Syria, Iraq AND Afghnaistan. To hear the neocons say it, though, they're spoiling with a fight with each of those countries.
You don't have to believe me, but we certainly have the military capability of taking on all those others you have mentioned.
You are mixing the military campaign with some new requirement to nation-build afterwards.
We DON'T have to get involved in nation-building. It was not my first choice in Iraq. I would simply have knocked them off and any other successive government that continued to attack us. After a while, one would have come along that wanted a bit of longevity.
But, I'm not the President and he saw value in an eventual democracy in the middle of the fertile crescent, and he saw value in drawing islamo-fascists to Iraq to fight them.
That's part of the equation. We can't afford for Iraq to become like Afghanistan or Somolia, a power vacuum allowing bona fide terrorists to operate with impunity. Once you take out their only real government, well, you broke it, you bought it.
Not necessarily. There's no law that says we have to nation-build.
We didn't bother at all in the Mexican War. Sometimes the intent is to do nothing more than kick someone until they stop being a pest.
When did that happen?
1830's wasn't it?
Other examples of wars where there was no nation-building, just kicking the bad guys: The 67 & 73 Jewish Wars against the neighboring Arab states. The Falklands War between Britain and Argentina....circa early Maggie Thatcher (80ish?).
The Iran/Contra thing where we kicked Ortega's teeth a bit.
Those were much less complicated.
Go in, cuss, break some stuff and leave.
Surprisingly, Israel has better relationships with those nations not occupied, than with those that were. Jordan and Egypt sometimes even seem to swap spit with Israel. Lebanon and Syria, on the other hand, are a bit out of sorts.
Every God-approved war of Jewish self-defense following the founding of Israel in the Old Testament, no?
For that matter, if you kill Fagin the Thief when he's breaking into your house (Exodus 22:2), does that mean that you incure a Biblically-reciprocal obligation to adopt poor Oliver Twist? (We'll leave out consideration of Voluntary Charity, which is always nice and good; I'm talking about a theonomically-required moral obligation).
I agree with you. There is no obligation to rebuild someone who was busy trying to murder your people.
David did expand the influence of Israel just about from River to River, but he certainly didn't rebuild the conquered areas. The custom I think was the reverse.
They paid tribute to him.
What a strange world ours is compared to his.
There's probably a lot of truth in "The Mouse that Roared"
Actually, the problem with Afghanistan was not that the terrorists evolved in Anarchy, but rather with Government support.
As regards: AFGHANISTAN --
As Dana Rohrabacher reported to Joseph Farah, President Clinton incubated the Taliban regime in Afghanistan for at least three years, despite the fact that it was harboring Osama bin Laden, was responsible for growing 60 percent of the world's heroin and denied basic human rights to the nation, a U.S. congressman charges.
"In 1997, the Taliban overextended themselves," he says. "Thousands of troops were captured in the north. Much of their equipment was destroyed by the Northern Alliance. Nothing prevented the opposition from taking Kabul. The Taliban was more vulnerable than it ever was before."
The most overt source of Clinton Administration support came in late 1997, when the Clinton administration backed a plan to funnel money to the Taliban to reward them for fighting the War on Drugs, which eventually resulted in approval for a 1998 policy of funnelling $25 million a year to the Taliban government -- apparently viewing Taliban support in the War on Drugs as worth the cost of their support for a nutty fella named, ahem, Osama bin Laden. Tragically, this support for the Taliban continued into the Bush administration, which funnelled an additional $43 million to the Taliban in early 2001. As noted in the article, "The equivalent financial impact on the U.S. economy would have required an infusion of $215 billion. In other words, $43 million was very serious money to Afghanistan's theocratic masters."
After the destruction of the Twin Towers, the US Government reversed its policy and went to war to depose the terrorist-backing Taliban. Opium production levels have since soared to the highest levels in history under the incompetence of the weak central government in Kabul -- but I think I'd prefer a weak central government which is unable to control opium production, to a strong central government which actively supported the worst terrorist attacks on the US in history.
As regards: SOMALIA --
Well, the place is a mess. Recently, a pan-Islamist group of fundamentalist militants siezed control of Mogadishu, and are actively contesting with the provisional "Central" Government in Baidoa, which enjoys modest international recognition and some sparse military backing from Christian Ethiopia (a situation which, unfortunately, gives the Islamists the "propaganda high ground" amongst fellow Somalis, who are mostly muslim).
The good news is, However, current and former U.S. officials told the New York Daily News that Osama bin Laden's terror network isn't firmly established in Somalia, though the country hasn't had a central government in 15 years. U.S. Special Forces teams have found no signs of a firm al-Qaida presence, such as terror training camps, sources said. "Probably our worst fears have not materialized," said recently retired CIA counterterrorism official Paul Pillar. If Anarchy is supposedly the most fertile breeding ground for international terrorist groups, Somalia isn't much of an example for the case -- a predominantly Islamic country which has been in a state of Anarchy for 15 years, and still US Special Forces can find no firm Al Queda presence on the ground.
It seems logical to me... if I had a hankering for committing heinous acts of international terrorism, I think I'd have a lot less time for my hobby if were involved in a low-level block war with the neighboring cul-de-sac every other day of the week.
So... how do these situations compare with Iraq, which has seen "Nation-Building" to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousand of US Troops for the last three years? Well....
As Regards: IRAQ --
As a result of the elections certified January 2006, the new, "democratic" Iraqi government is now dominated by the UIA alliance between the SCIRI (Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) party, and the Dawa Party.
Well, who're they, you might ask?
Well, SCIRI is basically the Iraqi wing of the Council for Islamic Revolution in Iran -- YES, the fine people who brought us the 444-day Embassy Hostage Crisis in 1979!! Wonderful people, indeed.
And Dawa? The al Dawa party is also responsible for the bombing of the U.S. Embassy and French Embassies in Kuwait on December 12, 1983 in which six people were killed. While based in Tehran the al Dawa party formed a terrorist wing called the Islamic Jihad. Islamic Jihad and al Dawa were responsible for acts of terrorism against Americans in Kuwait and Lebanon. Islamic Jihad was the germ of what would later become the Iranian backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. The 1983 car bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 marines while they slept was carried out by these precursor groups to Hezbollah. That attack on the Marine barracks has been tied directly to Iran through its surrogates such as al Dawa. Yes, the folks who bombed the US Embassy in Kuwait (killing six) and murdered 241 American Marines in their Lebanon barracks in 1983!! And the Bush administration has managed to put these people in control of the Iraqi National Government.
So let's all give a big round of applause for "Nation-Building", and "Islamic Democracy", yeah buddy, hoo-ray.
It works so bloody well, lemme tell ya.
(Apologies for the sarcasm... but, No, I don't think thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars are really "worth it" to advance the political careers of the Iraqi wings of "the Tehran Hostage-taker Party" and "the Beirut Barracks-Bombers Party".)
best, OP
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I think we're going to have a substantial military presence in Iraq for a very long time.
Thank you for being the first to say it in this post. The writer of this article should consider his worldview before assigning "blame" for this matter
Are you saying that Jews were not opressed by the Roman occupiers? Or that Roman emperors were never murderous?
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