A USA Today/Pew Poll from January 2014 shows that Americans now believe by a 50%-38% margin that war against Iraq and the subsequent U.S. occupation (2003-2011) was stupid.
And the events of the last few days in Iraq are proving those Americans to be right.
One after another city in Iraq has fallen to the ISIS jihadists, which means:
- 4,487 of our soldiers died for nothing.
- 32,226 of our soldiers got wounded, some having lost their limbs, for nothing.
- More than $845 billion of taxpayers’ money was spent for nothing.
On top of it all, Christians are fleeing from Iraq, knowing full well what life under the ISIS would mean.
Under Saddam Hussein, Christians at least lived in peace in Iraq. But there isn’t a Christian left in the city of Mosul today.
Zenit.org reports, June 11, 2014, that speaking to the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, Mosul’s Chaldean Archbishop Amel Nona gave a graphic account of the Islamist take-over of Mosul and the people’s desperate struggle to flee to safety.
Nona said he thought Mosul’s last remaining Christians had left Mosul that until 2003, had been home to 35,000 faithful.
The Christians are among 500,000 thought to have fled Mosul, which was overthrown Tuesday, June 10. That event is now followed by news of militant attacks on the Iraqi city of Tikrit, 95 miles north of the capital Baghdad.
Describing reports of attacks to four churches and a monastery in Mosul, the archbishop, 46, said: “We received threats… [and] now all the faithful have fled the city. I wonder if they will ever return there.”
The archbishop, who in the ensuing crisis sought sanctuary in Tal Kayf, a village two miles from Mosul, described how the local community was doing its best to provide for crowds of people flooding out of the city and into the surrounding Nineveh plains, where there are a number of ancient Christian villages.
“Up at 5am yesterday [Tuesday, 10th June] morning we welcomed families on the run and we have tried to find accommodation in schools, classrooms and empty houses. We have never seen anything like this – a large city such as Mosul attacked and in chaos.”
He said that in the 11 years following the 2003 US-led overthrow of Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein, Christians in Mosul had declined from 35,000 to 3,000 and that “now there is probably no one left.”
BBC reports have described ISIS ambitions to create an Islamist caliphate spreading from northern Iraq across to northwest Syria.
From ISIS-controlled regions in Syria have come reports of Christians being asked to pay the Islamic Jaziya tax and pressure to convert to Islam.
Many thousands of Christians have fled the region.
See also “Attacked by Muslims, Christianity is going extinct in Middle East“
~Eowyn