This is awful, though also sadly predictable.
Posted by armand at May 9, 2007 01:51 PM | TrackBack | Posted to IraqAs many as 50 percent of Iraq's Christians may already have left the country, according to a report issued Wednesday by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a federal monitoring and advisory group in Washington D.C. ...
Islamic extremists have also targeted liquor stores, hair salons and other Christian-owned businesses, saying they violate Islam, the report said ...
In Saddam-era Iraq, the country's 800,000 Christians - many of them Chaldean-Assyrians and Armenians, with small numbers of Roman Catholics - were generally left alone. Many, such as Saddam Hussein's foreign minister and deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, reached the highest levels of power. But after U.S. forces toppled Saddam, insurgents launched a coordinated bombing campaign in the summer of 2004 against Baghdad churches, sending some Christians fleeing in fear. A second wave of anti-Christian attacks hit last September after Pope Benedict XVI made comments perceived to be anti-Islam. Church bombings spiked and a priest in the northern city of Mosul was kidnapped and later found beheaded. In the recent violence, residents of the Baghdad neighborhood of Dora said gunmen knocked on the doors of Christian families, demanding they either pay jizya - a special tax traditionally levied on non-Muslims - or leave. The jizya has not been imposed in Muslim nations in about 100 years.