CBN’s David Brody reports:
Barack Obama wants answers. He wants to know what the State Department is doing in coordination with the Iraqi Government to protect Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq. The Brody File has a copy of the letter Senator Obama sent to Secretary State Condoleezza Rice. You can read it here.
A recent Washington Post editorial wrote of the situation:
Priests have been beheaded; churches bombed; unveiled women burned with acid; men killed for operating theaters and barbershops; children murdered for wearing jeans, for mingling with the opposite sex or simply for being seen as symbolizing the infidels in some way. Criminals find members of religious minorities to be easy prey. During the buildup of U.S. forces this spring, a Sunni mosque in Baghdad’s Dora neighborhood issued a fatwa demanding that local Christians convert to Islam or pay an Islamic tax; thousands fled.
Many Christians have left Iraq since 2003. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees reports that Christians, now less than 4 percent of Iraq’s population, make up 40 percent of its refugees. Thousands more Christians, Yazidis and others are moving north, mainly to the rural Nineveh plain. This is their last hope for staying. Nineveh is the traditional home of the Assyrian Christians, who trace their civilization to Nimrod, Noah’s great-grandson, and their faith to the prophet Jonah and the apostle Thomas, both of whom preached there.
Pascale Warda, a Chaldean Christian who survived four assassination attempts, one of which killed her four bodyguards, while serving as Iraq’s interim migration minister, told the Commission on International Religious Freedom of the “desperate” plight of Iraq’s internally displaced people and the sense of abandonment they feel. Shortly afterward, the Senate went into recess without acting on a House humanitarian aid measure.
