ICC Note: Iraq’s historic Christian populations are now fighting for their very survival. The jihadist militant group has overrun much of the territory that has been the Christian homeland for centuries. With the Iraqi military seeming unable to provide protection, the local community is forming its own militias in an attempt to protect their land and their people from these attacks.

04/20/2015 Iraq (CNN) When ISIS overran their villages near Mosul in August 2014, a small group of Assyrians, a Middle Eastern minority with a history reaching back more than 4,000 years, picked up weapons and formed their own militia: Dwekh Nawsha — “The Sacrificers.”

Assyrians belong to the rapidly dwindling Christian population of Iraq — recent estimates from CAPNI, the largest Christian relief organization in northern Iraq put the number as low as 300,000 compared with 1.5 million 20 years ago — and many among them see the fight with ISIS as a final battle for survival against the Islamists.

“‘Ah, Assyrians — I’ve read about them in the Bible,’ is what many people say,” says Marcus Naissan, a 25-year-old electrical technician and member of Dwekh Nawsha. “But we are not just history, we are still alive, we are still here.”

The exodus of Christians from Iraq started prior to ISIS — and the civil war in the mid-2000s took an especially heavy toll. Today, most Iraqi Christians live in Kurdish areas in the north, which have been a relative haven of stability. And so far, the Kurds have been taking heavy losses to defend Christian and Yezidi minorities against ISIS.

Every night, the fighters hear the rumbling sound of coalition airplanes in the sky over Baqufa where they have their safe house just a few miles from the frontline. Here they relax, patrol the empty streets of the village and try to hinder ISIS suicide commandos from entering the near city of Dohuk where UNHCR says almost 100,000 refugees — many of them Christians — have found a temporary place to stay.
…