MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

AsiaNews – “Police in Mosul found the body of a Christian woman with her throat cut. The gruesome discovery was made today in an area where attacks have been perpetrated in the past against members of the city’s Christian minority, some, like abducted Bishop Faraj Rahho and Fr Ragheed Ganni, murdered.

Sources told AsiaNews that the victim is Shdha Elias, a 54-year-old Chaldean, who worked as a teacher ‘in a school in the al Bath neighbourhood.’ She ‘lived however in Bar Nirgal, near the university’. With her death, she joins ‘the long list of Christian martyrs in Mosul.’

For the source, ‘Tensions between Sunnis and Shias are running high across Iraq, not only in the North. And peace and national reconciliation appear far off.’

Mosul is a stronghold of Sunni Wahhabism, which is closely tied to Saudi Arabia. For experts on Iraqi politics, the aim is ‘to set up a state based on Sharia,’ with the Qur’an and the Sunnah as the basis of legislation and ‘Islam as the only state religion’. In such a system, members of other religions can choose between conversion, flight or paying taxes for non-Muslims.

In northern Iraq, Christians have been targeted for murder and kidnapping for the purpose of extortion. They have also been caught in the crossfire between Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds vying for power and control of the area’s rich oil resources.

In ten years of conflict, the Christian community has lost more than half of its members in an exodus of ‘Biblical’ proportions following a series of murders.

A Christian official in Mosul Governatorate, anonymous for security reasons, acknowledged that ‘many Christian families’ have fled. ‘They have lost confidence in everything,’ he said. ‘The government is incapable of doing anything to protect them. What future do non-Muslims have in countries where violence reins!'” Source – AsiaNews.it.

Flashback: Iraq’s ‘Twilight of Christianity’: Fleeing Islamic Extremism, Exodus From North Signals Iraqi Christians’ Slow Decline – “Iraq’s dwindling Christians, driven from their homes by attacks and intimidation, are beginning to abandon the havens they had found in the country’s north, discouraged by unemployment and a creeping fear that the violence they had fled was catching up to them. Their quiet exodus to Turkey, Jordan, Europe and the United States is the latest chapter of a seemingly inexorable decline that many religious leaders say tolls the twilight of Christianity in a land where city skylines have long been marked by both minarets and church steeples. Recent assessments say that Iraq’s Christian population has now fallen by more than half since the 2003 American invasion, and with the military’s departure, some Christians say they lost a protector of last resort.” Read more.

Islamists in Iraq to Christians: ‘If Anyone Decides to Reopen His Store, We Will Kill Him’ – “The Islamist campaign against all things contrary to Sharia Law continues, and to drive home just how dead serious they are about preventing Christians in Zakho and elsewhere from buying and selling products, notes have been left for Christians informing them that if they reopen their stores, they will be killed …” Read more.