generalspeaking

Impossible choices

"After being here for more than a millennium this is the Christians' last stand in Iraq. Over the centuries we have faced the sword so many times for our beliefs. In two, three, four years Christians will not be here because Daesh [Islamic State] kill us. We will probably be living in the U.S., Canada or Australia. Otherwise we will be erased from this earth."
Safa Jamel Bahnan, former Mosul airport truck driver

"It was a good beginning to start with airplanes [U.S. alliance airstrikes]. If ISIL had reached Irbil, they would have done to us what they did to Christians in Mosul."
"Someone has to stop Daesh, even if it takes years, because they want to destroy everything and bring us and the rest of the world back to the Middle Ages."
Elid Matte, refugee from Qaraqosh, 97% Christian

"If the U.S. airplanes had not been here at the right moment, Irbil would have fallen and ISIL would be here. Everybody knows it. So we know that air power can help to stop them."
Shoban Kunda, Irbil, Iraq

Thousands of Catholics camp out on the grounds of the UN High Commission for Refugees in the tents they provide, or they sleep under blankets as they have done for weeks in the small compound of St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Irbil. Masses there are celebrated in the Chaldean and Assyrian dialects of Aramaic, similar to the language spoken in the time of Jesus Christ.


These people of Iraq, at the very least, are anxiously awaiting a greater aerial assault by the international community, to come to their aid, perhaps to help them return to their abandoned towns and villages, taken under the command of Islamic State terrorists who offer them the opportunity to redeem their lives by surrendering their faith to the garbage heap of history while embracing Islam. Or, alternately, face the punishments that they deserve.

Some refugees seeking shelter in the shells of derelict buildings in Irbil, anticipate that with the rainy season their lives will become even more miserable. Yet preferable to remaining in their now-abandoned homes under the rule of the Islamic State, persecuted, threatened and eventually perhaps slaughtered. An estimated 100,000 Iraqi Christians have fled the plain of Mosul in waves of panic.

In June when Islamic State began to sweep east from the Syrian border, their brutalities of rape, kidnapping and murder were spoken of in hushed, horrified whispers of disbelief, heralding for the anxious villagers what their fate was likely to be, and they fled before the onslaught. Wherever Islamic State took control, ultimatums were issued for Christians to consider the choice similar to what Syrian Christians had been given.

Chaldean and Assyrian Catholics forced into internal exile by a bloody offensive by Sunni extremists in Iraq take communion at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in the safe haven that they have found in the Kurdish capital. Photo: Matthew Fisher/Postmedia News
 
Pay a costly ransom for their freedom, convert to Islam, or prepare to die. "What we are living is the last chapter of an ancient story", said Father Rian, the Chaldean Catholic priest whose sermons at St. Joseph's Catholic Church give aid to the dispossessed. "Bombing", said Father Zuhir who had fled Qaraqosh, along with 20 Syriac Catholic priests and 60 Syriac Catholic nuns, "is not so efficacious. There will have to be troops on the ground to retake Mosul and end this very dark period."

"There must be soldiers too. Otherwise immigration is our only future because it is impossible for me or any of us to become Muslims", grimly stated one of Father Zuhir's parishioners.

Labels: Atrocities, Christianity, Iraq, Islamic State, Refugees

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, October 07, 2014