Baghdad: Christians Flee Killing Muslims
By J. Grant Swank Jr. (05/12/07)
The sanctuaries are empty. Christians take seriously the threats. Muslims will slay them if they don't vacate Iraq. Therefore, countless numbers are leaving and have left, per Liz Sly of Tribune News.
"’They are talking about security plans and bringing peace, but nothing arrived in Dora. There are no rules, no government and no government forces,’ said Bishop Shlimon Warduni, auxiliary bishop of the Chaldean Patriarchate, the ancient Christian sect to which most of the Christians in the Dora area belong. ‘This is a full-scale persecution. In all of Iraq's history we didn't face a situation like this.’"
Secular media is not giving this the coverage that it deserves. It is regarded by most as "just another Christian story."
"Church leaders estimate that half of Dora's Christian community has already fled the notoriously violent Sunni extremist stronghold in southwestern Baghdad, a community of 500,000 in which Sunnis, Shiites and Christians once lived alongside one another. Shiites have already been expelled from all but the southernmost edge of the neighborhood. Although Christians had been individually targeted, usually for ransom, as a community they had largely been ignored, residents say.
"Among those who fled is Ayleen Georges, 40, whose husband was kidnapped in early April by Sunni insurgents. They later apologized, told him they had abducted the wrong man, and let him go. Ten days later, after the edict appeared, they kidnapped him again.
"He is too shaken to talk about being abducted, but she described how the gunmen repeatedly told him he would be killed unless he converted to Islam or left his home within 24 hours.
"’They said to him, "Why haven't you become a Muslim?" They told him to leave within 24 hours and they said we had to leave all our property and possessions behind, or we would be killed.’"
Islam World Rule is the postulate of zealot Muslims, even if it means their own lives sacrificed in suicide bombings, even it means offering their boys and girls upon Allah’s altar as slain children for the cause.
Muslims believe that even if one Christian lives in a neighborhood, that infidel must be slaughtered. That must take place even if scores of Muslims living in the same area will lose their lives as well. The sacrifice is worth the extermination of one Christian. It is an insane cultic motive that drives the extremist Muslims.
If the so-called moderate Muslims speak against the zealots, the moderates are threatened. In Canada a group of moderates tried to quell the zealot threats only to have their own lives put on the line, their houses and vehicles burnt. So much for the moderate Muslim impact upon the civil world.
"Sanharib Benuel, 23, left his home with his mother and brother last week after fliers spelling out the threat were posted on the walls around his neighborhood. He hoped to trick the Sunni insurgents by packing his suitcases, leaving a Sunni neighbor in his house, and then arranging for another neighbor to transport the suitcases to a relative's home the following day.
"But within hours, he said, gunmen came to the house and ordered the neighbor to leave, telling him: ‘This is a Christian house, and it has been confiscated.’ They then ransacked the house and stole its contents, said Benuel, who is now living in a church in another Baghdad neighborhood and is working at the church as a guard.
"Abdullah al-Noufali, head of the Christian Endowment, a state body that oversees Iraq's churches, said he had heard of many instances in which local Sunni residents had offered to help or protect their threatened Christian neighbors. He blames outsiders--the Al Qaeda-affiliated insurgents who have converged on Dora over the past three years, turning it into one of Baghdad's most notorious and violent extremist strongholds.
"Christians are fleeing in droves from the southern Baghdad district of Dora after Sunni insurgents told them they would be killed unless they converted to Islam or left, according to Christian leaders and families who fled.
"Similar episodes of what has become known as sectarian cleansing raged through Baghdad neighborhoods last year as Sunnis drove Shiites from Sunni areas and Shiites drove Sunnis from Shiite ones, but this marks the first apparent attempt to empty an entire Baghdad neighborhood of Christians."
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