Update 8/31/07 - Chuck Colson ccomments on Shea's article and includes other links.
Update 8/27/07 - Nina Shea offers a comprehensive assessment of the situation.
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From Archbishop Cranmer's blog:
Christians are being cleansed from their ancient neighbourhoods and villages by roving bands of terrorists and criminals. Muslim families swiftly move into the abandoned homes. According to Major General Benjamin Mixon, commander of US forces in northern Iraq, ‘this is an act of ethnic cleansing…almost genocide’. While Sunni and Shi’ia may be blowing each other up, they are united in targeting the Christians, and seek to cleanse them from Iraq in accordance with their respective interpretations of political Islam.
The irony of their situation is that Assyrian Christians are perceived by the ignorant Sunni and Shi’ia as being agents of the West; collaborators with the occupying forces. In fact, their presence in the region predates Islam by some 700 years. Assyrians are Semitic cousins of
the Jews: ‘Parthians’ were present on the day of Pentecost and became the first nation to adopt Christianity as their state religion in AD 179, more than a century before Armenia. They claim to have been the first to build churches and to translate the New Testament from Greek into their vernacular Aramaic, the language of Christ. Learned Assyrian Christians kept Greek science and technology alive while Europe lurched through the Dark Ages. For over a thousand years since the Muslim conquest of their homeland, Assyrians have lived in relative peace in the region. They have been second-class citizens of various caliphates, and there have been interludes of active persecution. But for the past 150 years, martyrdom has been their fate. In 1915, the Turkish junta viciously murdered some 750,000 Assyrian Christians and 1.5 million Armenians. Turkey has still not acknowledged this atrocity; indeed, it is a criminal offence to do so. Prior to 1915, Christians were 20% of Iraq’s population; today they are barely 2%. (more)