ICC Note:
Sameeha Wehba hid in a cow pen while an angry mob rampage through town, attacking Christian homes. Sameeha found that she is the only Christian left in the village Dahshour, south of Cairo. “Dahshour's entire Christian community -- as many as 100 families some estimate -- fled to nearby towns… At least 16 homes and properties of Christians were pillaged and some torched and a church damaged,” The Associated Press reports.
By Sarah El Deeb
8/4/2012 Egypt (Associated Press) – When the angry mob was rampaging through town, storming her home and those of other Christians, the 70-year-old woman hid in her cow pen, pushing a rock against the door. There she cowered for hours, at one point passing out from tear gas being fired by police that seeped in.
When Sameeha Wehba emerged just before dawn, she found she was the only Christian left in this small Egyptian village just south of Cairo.
Dahshour's entire Christian community -- as many as 100 families some estimate -- fled to nearby towns in the violence earlier this week. The flock's priest, cloaked in a white sheet to hide him, was taken out in a police van. At least 16 homes and properties of Christians were pillaged and some torched and a church damaged.
The violence was ultimately rooted in a dispute over a badly ironed shirt that escalated into a fight in which a Christian burned a Muslim to death, in turn sparking the rampage by angry Muslims.
"It was a devil's moment," Wehba said Thursday at the home of her Muslim neighbors, who have taken her in. "Whoever caused this was the devil's son."
The unprecedented exodus underscores how sectarian divisions that festered under decades of Hosni Mubarak's rule are taking a turn to the worse, complicated by the problems of post-revolution Egypt, a country where 10 percent of the population are Christian.
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