Ethnic Cleansing Campaign Against Iraq's Assyrians

international | rights, freedoms and repression | other press Friday June 15, 2007 14:40 by Absalom

The Assyrian International News Agency has produced a deeply troubling Genocide report regarding the Assyrian (Chaldean) Christians of Iraq. The report: Incipient Genocide: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Assyrians of Iraq portrays a systematic campaign of massacre and destruction of this indigenous population of Iraq.

Through intimidation, forced conversions, murder, kidnapping, beheading of Church leaders, rape, and daily threats against their security and lives, the Assyrian Christian population in Baghdad and other major cities has dwindled from a once-thriving community to almost nothing.

While all Iraqi civilians are victims of violence in Iraq, there is an organized agenda being carried out by Islamists and Kurdish authorities to either rid the country of their indigenous inhabitants, or to reduce them to nothing more than a religious minority with no grounds for asserting their ethnic identity.

The Assyrian Christians are the only indigenous population of Iraq, comprise 95% of the Christian population, and have lived in their lands for almost 7,000 years.

Since 2003, 33 Assyrian Churches have been bombed. Assyrian priests and Bishops have been kidnapped, tortured to death, and beheaded. Assyrian women are coerced under the Islamic jihad, with constant threats of rape or murder. Assyrian children are kidnapped, killed, crucified, and transferred to non-Assyrian families. Assyrian families in Baghdad are forced to pay an Islamic "protection tax" (jizya) by al-Qaeda.

Executive Summary of the report:
http://www.aina.org/releases/20070611184337.htm

Full report:
http://www.aina.org/reports/ig.pdf