A new wave of Iraqi Christians has fled to northern Iraq or abroad amid a campaign of violence against them and growing fear that the country’s security forces are unable or, more ominously, unwilling to protect them.
The flight — involving thousands of residents from Baghdad and Mosul, in particular — followed an Oct. 31 siege at a church in Baghdad that killed 51 worshipers and 2 priests and a subsequent series of bombings and assassinations singling out Christians. This new exodus, which is not the first, highlights the continuing displacement of Iraqis despite improved security over all and the near-resolution of the political impasse that gripped the country after elections in March.
....
The Christians and other smaller minority groups here, however, have been explicitly made targets and have emigrated in disproportionate numbers. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, these groups account for 20 percent of the Iraqis who have gone abroad, while they were only 3 percent of the country’s prewar population.
More than half of Iraq’s Christian community, estimated to number 800,000 to 1.4 million before the American-led invasion in 2003, have already left the country.
This post is dedicated to the persecuted Anglo-Catholics in the Church of England, who are forced to flee to the Roman Catholic ordinariates. (Irony alert!)
From the Telegraph:
Rt Rev John Broadhurst, the Bishop of Fulham, on his defection to the RC ordinariate:
"I don't feel I have any choice but to leave the Church and take up the Pope's offer. The General Synod has become vindictive and vicious.
"It has been fascist in its behaviour, marginalising those who have been opposed to women's ordination. We have not been given any space."
