Cries of the Persecuted

"In the last six months things have got particularly bad for the Christians. Here in this church, all of my leadership were originally taken and killed. All dead. But we never got their bodies back. This is one of the problems. I regularly do funerals here but it's not easy to get the bodies.

There's no comparison between Iraq now and then [before Saddam and after Saddam]. Things are the most difficult they have ever been for Christians. Probably ever in history."

-Reverend Canon Andrew White (CBS 60 Minutes, 2007)

 

"On March 18, 2006, gunmen broke into our home, shot and killed two of our five children. The children were shot when they tried to escape through a window. When the murders burst in, they shouted my name. They said that I was engaged in un-Islamic activity. After the killings, I received a written threat from a terrorist group called Ansar Islam. They warned us to leave our home or face dire consequences. We left in haste without our belongings."

-Rad Azzo Sabri

"I was kidnapped on February 12, 2007. Masked men hijacked my car. They put a sack over my head, tied my hands and feet and put me in the trunk of another car. At first, the kidnappers tortured me. I could not see anything because of the sack. But I could hear what was going on around me. The kidnappers said they were 'God's Warriors' (Ansar Islam). They said Christians are America's spies, who opened the doors of Iraq to the United States. There were other prisoners at the same place. Our captors beheaded a Shiite woman, who said she was pregnant. I could hear all the terrible sounds when it happened."

-Pastor Bardelian Youssef, Jesus of Nazareth Church

"My wife, Gurjia, and I had a house in Mosul, but had to move out. On September 19, 2006, a letter was pushed under our gate. It was from the Shura Council of Ansar Islam. They demanded payment of $50,000 as a jiza payment to enable us to remain in our home. The note said 'don't bother complaining to the Americans, because they will not stop us and we will come to kill you'. We fled Mosul and came back to our ancestral village, Keramlesh.

On June 3, 2007, my son was shot to death in Mosul. He was executed together with three deacons Ghassan Assam, Basman Youssef and Wahid Hanna. They were leaving the Church of the Holy Spirit when armed men, shouting Allahu Akhbar started shooting at them. He was targeted because he stood firm in the Christian faith and encouraged the Church."

-Aziz Matti Ganni (father of Catholic priest Fr. Ragheed Aziz Ganni)

"I was forced to leave my home in the Dora district last April with eight other members of my family. A terrorist group demanded that we convert to Islam, pay protection money or leave our home without any belongings. We chose to leave.

The situation in Dora got much worse after the American invasion. Islamic terrorists gained control of the neighborhood right under the nose of the U.S. army. The greatest wave of attacks against Christians in Dora started around September 2006. Most of the Muslims consider us foreigners-aliens who do not really belong in our own country. The clergy were the first to suffer. They were kidnapped and killed.

The Iraqi government knows that Christians are attacked, but they do nothing to help us. We are unimportant to them. I do not want to leave Iraq, but it is not clear that we have a future here."

-Nabeel Khnano

"The Muslims have always looked down on us. Since my youth, I have experienced insults. They have always called us 'traitors,' 'infidels' and 'crusaders.' Now they accuse the Christians of collaborating with the Americans.

Within just a few years, all the Christians will be gone from Baghdad, Basra, Mosul and Kirkuk. The few that will remain in Iraq will be found in some of the villages in the North. I don't see much chance of democracy succeeding in Iraq. Old fashioned Islam is too deeply embedded in the minds of most Iraqi Muslims."

-Salem Gorgies*

*Name has been altered for security reasons