Kirsten Powers of USA Today is reporting that the extremist al-Qaeda splinter group the Islamic State, formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), is systematically eliminating or driving out all aspects of Christianity from Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, and Powers wants to know who will do something about it.
Since IS overtook Mosul in June of this year, they have ordered Christians to convert to Islam, pay extra taxes or face death; they later revoked the tax option. Most of Mosul’s Christians have fled to neighboring Kurdistan, and there is no hope of return to their homes—IS has confiscated and given their homes, businesses and possessions away. Human rights lawyer Nina Shea told Powers, “We now have 5,000 destitute, homeless people with no future.”
“This is ancient Nineveh we are talking about,” Shea explained. “They took down all the crosses. They blew up the tomb of the prophet Jonah. An orthodox Cathedral has been turned into a mosque. … They are uprooting every vestige of Christianity.”
Shea told more stories and begged the U.S. for assistance in a Fox News op-ed this week. “In 2003, Iraq’s Christians, at 1.4 million, were among the region’s most robust Christian communities,” she wrote. “Since then, more than a million of them have fled. Their banishment from Mosul is irreversible. Whether these newly displaced people, among the last Christians to speak Aramaic, Jesus’ own language, will be able to remain in the region at all is likely to depend on America’s response.”
