ICC Note:  Today, Iraq is voting in its fourth election cycle since the fall of Saddam and its first election since the rise of ISIS. Both events lead to a massive exodus of Christians from the country. With community trust broken and still thousands displaced, Christians are very concerned about their future inside Iraq. Christians are automatically allocated 5 out of 329 seats in Iraq’s Council of Representatives.

05/12/2018 Iraq (World Watch Monitor) –   Iraqis go the polls on Saturday (12 May) for the first time since the military defeat of Islamic State, whose campaign of terror against non-Muslims pushed thousands of the country’s last Christians to flee their homeland.

Only about 200,000 to 300,000 Christians are thought to remain in Iraq now, mostly in the Nineveh Plains and the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in the country’s north. Around 700,000 emigrated in the violent years that have followed the 2003 US-led invasion and the 2014 appearance of IS, and tens of thousands more have fled to Kurdistan. Politically weak, Christians will be hoping the election process helps rather than hinders the country’s slow progress towards peace.

The vote is going ahead despite a plea from Sunni and Kurdish MPs to delay it to allow more time for people to return home. It has already been postponed from last September, when the military action against IS was ongoing. More than 2.3 million Iraqis, mainly Sunni Muslims but also tens of thousands of Christians, remain displaced. Many of the displaced Sunnis are in camps around the former IS strongholds of Mosul and the western Anbar region, and in Anbar the army is still sporadically attacked by IS jihadists.

However, a spokesman for the Iraqi Embassy in London told World Watch Monitor that displaced Iraqis would be able to vote as long as they had the required form of identification. “The High Electoral Commission in Iraq has provided all the necessary requirements for all Iraqis to vote with no exception,” he said, adding that displaced people who no longer have their biometric card, nor the electronic card used in previous years, still would be able to cast their vote if they could produce an official document with their name and photo attached to it.

Some 24 million Iraqis are eligible to take part in Saturday’s elections for the 329 seats of the Council of Representatives. Those elected then will determine the president and prime minister.

Under the country’s quota system, established in 2004-05 after the removal of Saddam Hussein by US-led forces, Christians are allocated five of those seats, and the other non-Muslim minorities a total of four. The Christians’ seats are in Baghdad, Mosul, Kirkuk, Duhok and Erbil.

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