The Christian population in Iraq has now diminished to an alarming 50,000 to 250,000, compared with 1.4 million in 2003. They were either massacred by jihadists or abducted.
Christians have faced being forced to convert to Islam, pay a high living tax (jizya, mandated in the Qur’an) to the Islamic State, or abandon their ancestral homes. Many were enslaved or murdered.
Reverend Canon Andrew White, (aka “The Vicar of Baghdad”) known for his love of humanity, stated of Islamic State jihadists: “When I invited ISIL to dinner they said, ‘Yes, we’ll come, but we’ll chop off your head.’ Rather kind of them to warn me.”
The gentle and kind Reverend White, whom I have personally interviewed many times, has witnessed the worst atrocities on the ground against his fellow Christians, minorities and Yazidi girls who are taken as sex slaves, and he finally declared:
“I have looked through the Quran trying to find forgiveness… there isn’t any. If you find it, tell me. This makes it very difficult to talk to ISIS because they can show you quite clearly that it is what Allah wants. They can justify their position when Allah says you should combat and fight the infidel and they say, ‘Well, these are infidels.’ So the question is, how can you prove that these are not infidels? And you can’t.”
“Christian Iraqi Population Shrinking; Persecution ‘Worse Than Under Saddam Hussein’”, by Stoyan Zaimov, Christian Post, June 5, 2016:
A human rights group has warned that minorities in Iraq, including Christians, are facing a “catastrophic” reality with tens of thousands of people murdered or abducted by terror groups.
“The impact on minorities has been catastrophic. Saddam [Hussein] was terrible; the situation since is worse. Tens of thousands of minorities have been killed and millions have fled for their lives,” said Mark Lattimer, head of Minority Rights Group, according to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The Christian population was as many as 1.4 million in Iraq back in 2003 during the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, but that number has dwindled since. In October 2015, Aid to the Church in Need said that only 300,000 Christians were left, but MRG says that number is now down further to somewhere between 50,000 to 250,000.
Iraq’s minorities suffered in various ways under the decades-long dictatorship of Hussein, but the human rights group insisted that things have only been getting worse in the 13 years of warfare since the U.S. military campaign toppled the regime.
Persecution of Christians and other minorities has especially escalated since the summer of 2014 with the rise of the Islamic State terror group, which has captured several cities in Iraq, including ones with formerly notable Christian populations, such as Mosul.
Iraqi Christians have been forced to choose between converting to Islam, paying a high living tax to the terror group, or abandoning their ancestral homes – with many enslaved or killed.
The Yazidi, Turkmen, Shabak, and Kaka’i minorities have also faced significant persecution with the rise of IS, MRG said….

Paul N Silas says
After WW I the World’s Marxist met in Germany to try and figure out why the Russian Marxist Revolution did not spread to the rest of Europe and the Americas. The conclusion was that the Christian Faith/Culture was preventing World Wide Socialism.
Since then there has been a constant attack on our Faith from all sides. Islam, as horrible as it is, is just one more tool.
The Cold War never ended, it just went underground!
Pray for our fellow Christians & Jews everywhere.
bridgette says
You bet there are people celebrating. Moslems are celebrating. They always celebrate the blood letting of infidels. It’s their m.o. didn’t you know?
Hector Archytas says
I think that leninism could not spread because it is a secular form or Orthodox christianity very different than judaism, catholicism and proptestantism.
Monotheist is on trial as it is the heart of the issue. Without Noah and the flood myth, there is no jihad nor holy war.
Jay Boo says
Inquiring minds at NPR want to know.
What about Muslim victims?
Just today NPR said that after the BREXIT vote Muslims are facing hate crimes.
As an example they mentioned an angry customer tossing change at a Pakistani store clerk.
No mention of genocide against Christians though.
bridgette says
In a moslem majority country, all minorities are treated with loathing and injustice and murder. How do we save them. We must save them. Why aren’t we helping these poor people, our people. Why hasn’t the Pope spoken out against this? He should be declaring another crusade not licking moslems feet. Who do they all think they’re kidding with this lack of action. Its a holocaust on everyone non moslem and it started with the Jews 1400 years ago. I’m amazed that there aren’t more comments here. Doesn’t anyone give a damn about our people? Speak up while you still can for Christ’s sake.
Salome says
All the people who matter care about in the West is the feelings of Muslim women in headscarves who are spoken to rudely by strangers whenever a Muslim atrocity is reported in the news. That’s what really pushes the buttons of the do-gooders.
Christianblood says
bridgette posted
(.. We must save them. Why aren’t we helping these poor people, our people. Why hasn’t the Pope spoken out against this? He should be declaring another crusade not licking moslems feet. Who do they all think they’re kidding with this lack of action..)
Dear Bridgette, US and Western governments, as well as Western social, media, religious and political establishment elites, don’t care, absolutely and whatsoever what happens to Christians in the ME and elsewhere in the islamic world. These people are traitors who, very deeply hate Christians and other minorities who are persecuted by the genocidal muslim jihadists in the ME while they at the same time love and are even arming genocidal islamic jihadists in many of these places such as Syria. For example, a Christian militia in Iraq last year asked for help the US government so that that they can protect their villages from islamic fascist killers and US government refused to arm this Christian militia and the US rejected them while they are, at the same time, givings huge amount of arms to the islamic jihadists that are murdering Christians and other minorities in the region. Please read more of this on the link below:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260821/dc-refuses-arm-persecuted-christians-fighting-isis-raymond-ibrahim
Western Canadian says
And yet again, the paid russian troll comes by to gloat over the success that his russian compatriots have had, in their decades long stealth jihad against the West…. Every element he has mentioned in this post, summarizing the major rot in the west, is the result of his country successfully attacking the west from within….. HE is so proud!!!
gravenimage says
Christians facing extinction in Iraq at the hands of jihadist warriors
…………………
“Warriors”? Murderous thugs.
LB says
Obama, the imam-in-chief, must be laughing his way to a mosque right about now.
Michael Copeland says
The tainted media are not helping to inform the West.
In 2010 Mass at the main church in Baghdad was invaded by armed muslim jihadis who shot the priest in his robes: 58 were murdered. The Islam-compromised BBC news DID NOT EVEN MENTION IT. They failed to mention it the following day. Two days later the egregious Clive Myrie did mention it, referring to it as a “disaster”.
Godwin says
U can blame J W Bush n Tony Blair for dethroning Saddam Hussain for this atrocity.
Denny Lee Penticoff says
Blame anything other than Islam, right? Saddam had one Nestorian adviser and that made him a protector of Christians. About 200,000 Kurdish and Iraqi Christians that he slaughtered disagree.
bostongal912 says
The amount of Christians that are being let in the country you can count on your two hands! But Sunni Muslims are being let in by the thousands! Why? It seems to me that the Christians are far worse off! The Islamic State are Sunni Muslims! They are murdering Christians and other Muslims! We should be bringing in more Christians! Just saying!!!
Michael Copeland says
The Islam-dominated UN chooses who is to be a refugee. Many of the refugee camps abroad are muslim-controlled and drive Christian refugees away by violence.
The Obama administration is PAYING American charities to act as CONTRACTORS for receiving and “planting” these “seed communities” of muslims all over the USA. It is designed to look like charity: it is organised population-engineering and culture-destruction.
See Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch.
Angemon says
Standard islamic orthodoxy.
melancholy observer says
The Germans were key to Nazism and the holocaust. Now they are key to the Islamo-nazism of Europe. We can thank the monster Adolph Hitler for the first achievement, and the bleeding heart idiot Angela Merkel for the second effort. But it is the German people who have let it all happen.
Mike says
By comparison, things were *great* under Saddam.
Who’d have thunk it?
Carl says
The gentle and kind Reverend White is incorrect when he says that there is nothing about forgiveness in the Koran. Actually, there is a fair amount of it, both on the part of Allah toward human beings and on the part of human beings toward one another. See, for example, http://www.harunyahya.com/en/Articles/17230/verses-of-the-quran-about
However, none of the passages about forgiveness negate any of the many verses commanding Moslems to make war on non-Moslems, Christians included.