UN protests as six more Iraqi Christians killed
PHOTO | AFP
Nijad Yousif fights back tears during a demonstration calling on the American and Iraqi governments to protect Iraqi Christians during a downtown rally in Chicago, Illinois, to draw attention to the treatment of Assyrian Christians in Iraq.
What you need to know:
- Archbishop pleads for help from the West as death toll in attacks reach 50
BAGHDAD, Wednesday
The UN Security Council today condemned militant attacks against religious targets in Iraq as France said there is a deliberate campaign to “destroy the Christian community.”
The council asked the UN to provide information on the number of religious minorities driven out of Iraq because of sectarian violence.
The UN Security Council was “appalled by and condemned in the strongest terms the recent spate of terrorist attacks in Iraq, including today’s,” said British ambassador Mark Lyall Grant reading a council press statement.
The council condemned all attacks in Iraq, “particularly those motivated by religious hatred.”
French ambassador Gerard Araud said recent attacks against a Christian cathedral and other targets in Baghdad was part of “a deliberate will to destroy the Christian community.”
He said Al-Qaeda’s bomb and gun assaults were “an attack on the diversity of Iraqi society.”
In Baghdad, a string of anti-Christian bombings has cost six more lives in the wake of a Baghdad church bloodbath, sowing panic in Iraq’s 2,000-year-old minority today, many of whom now want to flee.
“Since Tuesday evening, there have been 13 bombs and two mortar attacks on homes and shops of Christians in which a total of six people were killed and 33 injured,” a defence ministry official said. “A church was also damaged.”
The attacks come less than two weeks after 44 Christian worshippers, two priests and seven security personnel died in the seizure of the Baghdad church by Islamist gunmen and the ensuing shootout when it was stormed by troops.
On November 3, Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the hostage-taking at the capital’s Syrian Catholic cathedral and warned it would step up attacks on Christians. As Christians converged on their churches today to seek counsel from their religious leaders, the capital’s Syrian Catholic archbishop made an emotional appeal for Western countries to come to their rescue.
“It would be criminal on the part of the international community not to take care of the security of the Christians,” Athanase Matti Shaba Matoka said inside the church targeted on October 31 where he tried to console his flock.
“Everybody is scared,” he said. “People are asking who is going to protect them, how are they going to stay on in Iraq. We are trying to encourage them to stay patient.”
Vatican secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone described the latest attacks as “very painful.” (AFP)
