ICC Note: Father Douglas al-Bazi, who was kidnapped by ISIS in 2006, is touring the United States to bring awareness of the danger and sufferings Iraqi Christians are facing at the hands of barbarism. In a recent speech given by Bazi he expressed that the Christian refugees he oversees blame the US government for inaction and consequently the mass killings and exiles of Christian communities from their homes in Iraq. The timing of the airstrike campaigns has left many Christians wondering why the US did not act sooner in order to save their homes.
05/13/2016 Iraq (Christian Post): A Chaldean priest who oversees hundreds of Iraqi Christian refugees displaced by the Islamic State says Iraqi Christians blame the United States government for not protecting them and their ancient communities from being conquered by the barbaric terrorist group.
Father Douglas al-Bazi, who runs the Mar Elias Church and displacement center in Ainkawa, is in the U.S. this week to raise awareness about the plight facing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians who are forced to live as refugees after IS [also known as ISIS or ISIL] overtook their homes and villages in the Nineveh plains of Iraq in 2014.
Bazi, who is originally from Baghdad and was kidnapped from his church and tortured for days by Islamic militants in 2006, shared his story with a group of reporters and writers in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday and discussed the Iraqi Christian community’s aggravation with the U.S. government.
While President Barack Obama was calling IS the “JV team” and ignored “very, very clear” warnings about the rise of dangerous radical extremists groups in Iraq following the U.S. military’s complete withdrawal from the country in 2011, IS seemingly had little trouble conquering Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, and large swaths of territory in Northern Iraq in the summer of 2014.
As IS conquered Christian and Yazidi towns in Northern Iraq, many Yazidis and Christians were forced flee their homelands or risk being killed for their faith. It wasn’t until IS began making its way toward the Kurdish town of Erbil later that year that the U.S.-led coalition finally started its airstrike campaign against the militant organization.
Bazi explained that the timing of the airstrike campaign has left many religious minority refugees wondering why the U.S. did not act sooner to save their own villages.
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