By Baghdadhope
One year ago, on October 12 2006, the funeral service of Father Paul Iskandar killed in Mosul
In the October of 2006 the Iraqi Christians already knew to be the predestined victims of the violence bathing the country in blood. The inter-islamic violence that many times had struck them, innocent victims, the violence linked to the gangs who had seen in them the easy preys with no protection to be robbed, kidnapped, thrown out of their houses, stripped of all their possessions, and the aimed at violence: the worst. Because it is already difficult to be a victim, but being one because part of the Christian minority, “unfaithful” and “enemy’s allied” is worse: it kills the hope, it spreads the terror.
So there had been the destroyed churches and the kidnapped priests. Actions hardly referable to the general chaos but that had a precise symbolic value in their brutality: Christians and the Church were not welcome in Iraq.
In that October the limit of the “worst” seemed to have been already overcome. But it was not so. On the 9 of the month a priest disapperared in Mosul. Father Paul Iskandar, of the Syriac Orthodox Church, didn’t come back home that day. Another kidnapping, it was said. An hypothesis confirmed by the ransom immediately requested to the Church, a request by that time linked to a parallel one: the clear condemnation by the Syriac Orthodox Church of Pope Benedict XVI’s speech made in Regensburg on the 12 of September, a speech by many interpreted as an attack to Islam.
Although the ransom requested was high the Church began to raise the money. And as for the condemnation of Pope’s words it had already expressed its position dissociating itself by posters on the doors of the churches.
But it was not sufficient. On the 11 of October, after only two days of kidnapping, and without giving the Church the time to raise the huge amount of money requested, the body of Fr. Paul Iskandar was found in Mosul. It had been a savage killing. He had been beheaded and his hands and feets had been cut off from his body.
A useless and beastly violence had hit an innocent, another martyr of the Iraqi hell.
In that October the limit of the “worst” seemed to have been already overcome. But it was not so. On the 9 of the month a priest disapperared in Mosul. Father Paul Iskandar, of the Syriac Orthodox Church, didn’t come back home that day. Another kidnapping, it was said. An hypothesis confirmed by the ransom immediately requested to the Church, a request by that time linked to a parallel one: the clear condemnation by the Syriac Orthodox Church of Pope Benedict XVI’s speech made in Regensburg on the 12 of September, a speech by many interpreted as an attack to Islam.
Although the ransom requested was high the Church began to raise the money. And as for the condemnation of Pope’s words it had already expressed its position dissociating itself by posters on the doors of the churches.
But it was not sufficient. On the 11 of October, after only two days of kidnapping, and without giving the Church the time to raise the huge amount of money requested, the body of Fr. Paul Iskandar was found in Mosul. It had been a savage killing. He had been beheaded and his hands and feets had been cut off from his body.
A useless and beastly violence had hit an innocent, another martyr of the Iraqi hell.