{"id":2006,"date":"2007-04-23T09:34:02","date_gmt":"2007-04-23T09:34:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/04\/kirkuk-christians.html"},"modified":"2007-04-23T09:34:02","modified_gmt":"2007-04-23T09:34:02","slug":"kirkuk-christians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/04\/kirkuk-christians.html","title":{"rendered":"Kirkuk Christians"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Chaldean bishop of Kirkuk makes an appeal:<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u201cIn Iraq Christians are dying, the Church is disappearing under continued persecution, threats and violence carried out by extremists who are leaving us no choice: conversion or exile\u201d.  This is the urgent appeal sent to AsiaNews by msgr. Louis Sako, Chaldean Archbishop of Kirkuk, while reports arrive of car bombs and the death of Christians in the Kurdish area, until now untouched by the confessional violence. <\/p>\n

The bishop who is president of Iraq\u2019s Council of Catholic Churches\u2019 Committee for inter religious dialogue , signed a declaration regarding the \u201ctragic situation of Baghdadis Christians\u201d, denouncing militant groups which under the threat of armed violence ask Christians to convert immediately to Islam or to consign their property and leave the country.  The same thing happens in Mosul, but with a different \u201cchoice\u201d: pay a monetary tribute to the Jihad if they want to avoid their death.  <\/p>\n

The Iraqi Christian community, at home and abroad, has long urged the local Church to take a stand against the forced evacuation, rape, kidnap, paying a ransom, blackmail, scarring and killing they suffer and the complete lack of protection from the local government and coalition forces. And in the last two days, as the controversial plan to install a secure zone for Christians in the Niniveh plain begins to take shape, the terrorists have begun targeting the zoned area.  \u201cIt\u2019s almost a political gesture \u2013 observes msgr Sako \u2013 as if to say: \u201cwe can hit anywhere, nowhere is safe\u201d.<\/p>\n

The confessional based attacks are no longer just restricted to Baghdad and Mosul, but now target small centres in the North.  Yesterday a group of fundamentalists executed 23 yazidi on the road linking Mosul to Ba\u2019ashika, a majority Christian village: they stopped a bus and after having made Arabs and Christians alight they killed the faithful of this ancient religion, based on the strong Good-Evil dualism.  Today a car bomb close to a school in Tell-el-skop, a Christian village, and 9 people died including 2 children; 60 were wounded.  A convent of Dominican nuns, which is nearby, was badly damaged in the blast.  <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Chaldean bishop of Kirkuk makes an appeal: \u201cIn Iraq Christians are dying, the Church is disappearing under continued persecution, threats and violence carried out by extremists who are leaving us no choice: conversion or exile\u201d.  This is the urgent appeal sent to AsiaNews by msgr. Louis Sako, Chaldean Archbishop of Kirkuk, while reports arrive…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nKirkuk Christians - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/04\/kirkuk-christians.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Kirkuk Christians - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Chaldean bishop of Kirkuk makes an appeal: \u201cIn Iraq Christians are dying, the Church is disappearing under continued persecution, threats and violence carried out by extremists who are leaving us no choice: conversion or exile\u201d.  This is the urgent appeal sent to AsiaNews by msgr. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2006\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}