Assyrians Need a Safe Have in Iraq

By Shamiram Demir

Lurzen(Switzerland) – AINA — Freelance journalist Nuri Kino has recently written the report “By God: Six Days in Amman.” During six days in April, he met several Iraqi refugees in the capital of Jordan, and was able to hear why they had fled.

He has almost daily contact with Assyrians, also called Syriacs and Chaldeans, in the war struck Iraq. Only a couple of days ago he received a phone call about an Assyrian couple who had been killed because of them working as interpreters for the American embassy in Baghdad. They were on the wrong side.

“This is what it looks like almost every day,” Says Nuri Kino. But it is not the constant reports of homicides and persecutions, but the signals of a systematic and ethic cleansing of the Christian Assyrians in Iraq is taking place, which made Nuri Kino go to Jordan during spring.

Changed attitude
“During the time of Saddam, they were ethnically persecuted, but as long as they changed their names into Arabic or Kurdish ones, and agreed to be called only Christians, they were allowed to practice their religion in peace. Half a year after the American invasion, a new systematic persecution with one single aim started — to extinguish the existence of the natives of Iraq.

Churches are bombed, priests are brutally killed, nuns are raped and children are kidnapped…and it continues”. “There are people who go as far as to call it genocide,” He says, and refers to the president of the Christian Barnabas Foundation, with principal center in Great Britain. At the moment there are between up to 150,000 Christian Assyrians in Amman, the capital of Jordan.

Want a Safe Haven
According to the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, about 1.9 million Iraqis are refugees in the neighboring countries, Syria and Jordan in particular.

The Catholic bishop in Baghdad, Andreas Abouna, said in a recent press release that as many as half of the Christian inhabitants of Iraq, as many as half a million people, have fled the country since the invasion of 2003. “In 1991 the Kurds needed protection, in 2007 the Assyrians need protection,” Says Nuri Kino.

“More and more Assyrian people are demanding an autonomous area in Iraq. That would be in the Plain of Nineveh, the ancient homeland of the Assyrians, where the Christians are still a majority of the population.” Sweden’s Secretary of State, Carl Bildt, condemned Sunday’s murder (AINA 6-3-2007) of an Assyrian priest and three deacons, saying “the attack is most tragic and unacceptable. There is need for a political development in order for human rights for all to become reality in Iraq.

The US Ambassador to Sweden said of Sunday’s murders, “…a horrible act of terror. The issue of religious persecution in Iraq will be brought up for discussion by President Bush.”