"La situazione sta peggiorando. Gridate con noi che i diritti umani sono calpestati da persone che parlano in nome di Dio ma che non sanno nulla di Lui che è Amore, mentre loro agiscono spinti dal rancore e dall'odio.
Gridate: Oh! Signore, abbi misericordia dell'Uomo."

Mons. Shleimun Warduni
Baghdad, 19 luglio 2014

17 gennaio 2010

Christianity is dying in Mosul

By Baghdadhope*

News source: Ankawa.com

Many are the methods to make a community feel itself as not accepted in a place. No one can say each of them has not been tried in Mosul. The web site
Ankawa.com reports today the umpteenth killing of a member of the Christian community.
Sa'adallah Yousef Girgis, or Abu Saif, "father of Saif" as he was called in homage to his first male son's name, was 52 years old, he was married, he used to sell vegetables in Mosul and he was killed in cold blood by many shots while working.
Killings of civilians, priests and a bishop, abductions, threats, forced evictions. To the Christians in Mosul are old story. Every method is good to threat them and force them to flee maybe to "clean" the city from every non islamic element, certainly to take possession of their houses, their trades, their jobs.
They cannot kill them all. Someone would survive, and such an action could draw the international attention - however careful in linking the words genocide and Christians - but it's possible to terrorize them so to make them "emigrate voluntarily" being certain that the flee of a single individual - a slow agony for a community - will disappear in the cauldron of the stories of all the refugees in the world.
Maybe it will happen for the Christian students of Mosul university in the light of what happened some days ago and that in Italy are usually called "mafia threats".
On January 10 the explosion of an explosive device hidden behind one of the back wheels of one of the about 20 buses used by the students to go to Mosul from the near city of Bakhdida caused the wounding of some of them. The explosion took place in the garage where the bus was parked waiting for the sudents to be taken back home.
Five of them were slightly wounded by the glasses of the bus and three of them, the sisters Wafa and Nada Youssef Alqassab and a boy, Karim Younadam, were more seriously injured. According to some sources of Ankawa.com the dean of Mosul university immediately charged the engineering department to create a protection device for the buses that take back and forth the Christian students, police began an investigation and even arrested a suspect: a student of the same university living in the district of Telafar. Despite that on January 16 another explosive device, detonated by police bomb disposal experts in a safe area, has been found on a bus this time when it was still near Bakhdida.
Will we be surprised in discovering that a student from Bakhdida, Iraq, is trying to go on with his life somewhere else? Maybe in our city?
But, what we would do if we were him?