ICC Note: Iraq’s Christian leaders are urging their people to stay in the country, but they know that the security situation has to change. They’ve called for greater international help to stop what some have labeled a “slow-motion genocide.”
12/09/2014 Iraq (Christian Daily) The head of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Iraq says the current US-led coalition of airstrikes will not completely stop the radical Islamic State, and he has called for a stronger response from the international community to ensure Christians can remain in the region.
“Bombing is also killing people, destroying the infrastructure, houses, schools, churches,” said Patriarch Louis Sako, according to Catholic news source Crux. “There’s no military solution for the conflict, especially when there are no troops on the ground providing assistance.”
Sako, recently took part in a 48-hour pilgrimage to visit refugees who have been displaced by the violence, said the only way the Islamic State could be expelled is through cooperation between the US coalition and the Iraqi central government.
Sako said the presence of Christians in the Middle East is imperative for peaceful coexistence in the Middle East.
“What’s going on in Iraq is a tragedy, and it’s an international moral duty to help those who are paying the price of fundamentalism to stay at home,” Sako said.
Other Chaldean Catholic leaders have become vocal regarding the violence in the Middle East, with some referring to it as a “slow-motion genocide.”
Sako has previously staed that for many months “the world turned its back” to what was happening in Iraq and Syria, where almost a half-million Christians, Yazidis, and other religious minorities currently live in “crowded cabins or out in the open, in small tents that cannot shelter them from the cold winter.”
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