Safety Zone Could Be the Answer for Iraq’s Endangered Peoples
AINS Despite the fall of Saddam Hussein, and a proclamation of liberty in Iraq by the United States, Christians continue to flee the country in their thousands. Why? It is too dangerous to stay. As political and religious factions jostle for power, lawlessness continues to prevail outside areas patrolled by foreign military.

More significantly, Muslim groups steeled by extremist Islamic teachings about Christians, Jews and other religious minorities, are intent on removing Christians from the Iraqi state and taking their possessions. Christian communities have received letters from local Islamic groups saying that if they don’t leave, their churches will be bombed, their children kidnapped, their women raped and their families murdered. Often the demand comes with a proviso–if the family converts to Islam, they will be saved. But for many Christians, that’s absolutely out of the question. So when a deadline is attached to the deal, it’s time to go.

“Hundreds of people are fleeing towns like Mosul and Kirkuk in the north,” said Hermiz Shahen, Secretary of the Assyrian Universal Alliance in Australia . “If they stay, they feel guilty–they could never forgive themselves if their children were kidnapped or killed. So, many of them flee to Jordan and Syria , and end up staying there for years.”

The Assyrians, who are neither Arab, nor Kurd, nor Muslim, are Iraq ‘s indigenous people. And they are proudly Christian. The Assyrian Church of the East, the Syriac Orthodox Church, and the Chaldean Church of Babylon are the major denominations, while there are also a growing band of Protestant, evangelical and Pentecostal traditions as well.

“The Assyrians were the first to convert to Christianity and the first to take the gospel all over the world. Now we are facing total elimination,” Mr Shahen said.

Indeed, the indigenous people of Iraq are watching their ancestral lands being stolen from beneath their feet.”We are left asking, ‘Why is the Western world not doing anything?'” said Mr Shahen. “Assyrian Christians are feeling they’ve been betrayed by the international community.

“What we would like see is more attention given to the Christian issue in Iraq .

“In the past, the international community created a homeland and protection for the Kurdish people. We would like to see the same protection extended to the Assyrian Christians.”

Mr Shahen would like other Christians around the world to work together to bring about the establishment of a new homeland for Assyrians.

“A safety zone, an administrative area in our ancestors’ homeland could be created, to which all Assyrians could return — a protected region where people can gather, build houses and establish themselves, a place where they will not feel threatened.”This is what we would like to see happen.”

Other non-Muslims in Iraq have also suffered. The Sabian Mandaean Association of Australia, representing a small religious group associated with the teachings of John the Baptist, reports that the Mandaean community in Iraq is now less than half of what it was before the fall of Saddam Hussein. The Association reports that their decline within Iraq is not only due to people leaving the country, forced conversions and killings by vigilantes, but also through forced marriages of young girls to Muslim men. Some are raped with the expressed intention of preventing them from marrying within their communities and becoming the mothers of a new generation of Mandaeans.