ICC Note
Violence has increasingly been pushing Christians from their homes. According to the Barnabas Fund, Christians will cease to exist in the Middle East by 2022. Many of these Christian communities have existed in the Middle East since ancient times and have historically lived in peace with their Muslim neighbors. The Barnabas Fund details seven actions we can take to save the Christians in the Middle East from extinction.
06/01/2017 Middle East (AINA) – A new manifesto has been released by the Barnabas Fund — an international aid agency helping persecuted Christians around the world, especially in places under Islamic domination — presenting seven actions needed to save entire Christian populations in the Middle East from elimination.
First comes the recognition that “without specific urgent action now, there is a very real danger that Christian communities will have ceased to exist in large parts of the Middle East by the time of the next general election in 2022.”
The recommendations are addressed to the U.K. government, but they apply to other Western governments that are capable of taking action.
“Soon after the 2003 Western-led military intervention in Iraq a targeted campaign of church bombings, kidnapping, and assassination of church leaders began,” the report explains. “Consequently, although only 3-4 percent of the Iraqi population were Christians, roughly a third of all Iraqis who have fled the country are Christians. When the Syrian civil war started in 2011, anti-Christian violence soon began there too. One of the jihadi groups targeting them evolved into IS. Christians and other non-Muslim minorities such as Yazidis have been executed and enslaved as jihadists seek to religiously cleanse the area of ancient communities such as Christians and Yazidis who have lived alongside Muslims for centuries, and very harmoniously in recent generations.”
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