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NEWS AND VIEWS THAT IMPACT LIMITED CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with
power to endanger the public liberty." - - - - John Adams

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Iraq's Christians make final stand on the Mosul frontline


Established in 363 AD
Iraqi families have sought refuge inside St Matthew's Monastery

A Last Stand For God
  • Christian families from Mosul have sought refuge in St Matthew’s Monastery. Others vow to take a stand against the Islamists - whatever the cost.
  • While Iraqi Christians are being butchered and their churches burned George Bush remains silent and in hiding refusing to admit that his insane war released forces that have nearly destroyed Christianity in the Middle East.


Captain Firaz Jacob knows he may well be mounting a last stand at the frontiers of the Christian settlement of Bartella on the outskirts of Mosul.

Less than a mile down the road are the jihadists of Isis, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, and the portly, middle-aged Mr Jacob is aware that his home-grown militia are outnumbered.
 
“I stand here waiting for my destiny,” he said, as he stood this week by the last check-point on the road to Mosul and the black flags waiting in the desert reports the Telegraph.
 
Speaking of why he and his men were refusing to give up and go, Capt Jacob said was determined to resist the jihadists and their allies, who last week over-ran most of the rest of northern Iraq.
 
“We will stay here despite everything,” he announced. “All these armed groups we have seen, but nevertheless we will remain. We love our Christian way of life, we love our churches and we love our community.”


Iraqi Christians living in fear of ISIS



 
St Matthew’s Monastery, Iraq

Anywhere between half and three quarters of Iraq’s Christians - Chaldean Catholics, Syriac Orthodox, and the rest - have left the country and the Middle East to start new lives abroad since 2003.

The town of Bartella, ten miles from Mosul, is largely Assyrian Orthodox, and its 16,000 citizens currently face a very vivid incarnation of an ever-present threat. They have been car-bombed at least twice in recent years, but this time their presumed adversaries have an army.
 
In Biblical times, the Assyrians were the imperial rulers of Ninevah, in which province Mosul still sits today.

This week Mr Jacob, a father-of-three wearing a small pistol tucked into his jeans, an over-tight T-shirt, and a pot belly, had a small band of 600 volunteers to help him. They were backed up by some Kurdish troops sent from the city of Erbil an hour’s drive away.

If the jihadists are to be believed, he has nothing to fear. Through its social media accounts, the alliance of Isis and former Baathists from the Saddam Hussein regime that now runs Mosul has assured the wider world that they have no quarrel with the Christian minority.

So long as they observe the new rules - Sharia, implemented strictly - their places of worship will be protected.

These are places of worship that go back thousands of years. The oldest extant church in the world, dated by its murals to the first half of the third century, is just over the border in Syria.

Monks from St Matthew’s Monastery near Bartella, where Christian families from Mosul have sought refuge, are thought to have helped translate Greek scientific and philosophical texts into Arabic for the eighth-century Caliphs of the Abbasid empire in Baghdad, an example of co-operation that seems remote today.

Read More . . . .


Iraqi Christians
Protected under Saddam Hussein, up to three quarters of Iraq’s
Christians - Chaldean Catholics, Syriac Orthodox, and the rest - have
left the country and the Middle East to start new lives abroad since the
insane invasion by George Bush in 2003.


Pleas fall of deaf ears
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.

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