"This recent bombing in northern Iraq shows what will happen to religious minorities if American troops leave Iraq early," said Reverend Patrick J. Mahoney, Director of the Christian Defense Coalition, a US-based network comprising conservative, religious and disability groups.
Tuesday’s explosions of four truck bombs in two villages of Yazidis, adherents of a pre-Islamic Middle Eastern religion, were the deadliest coordinated attack in Iraq since the US-led invasion
in 2003.
The attack, allegedly carried out by al-Qaida militants, was reportedly described by American military leaders as an act of ""ethnic cleansing," resembling the wars in the Balkans of the 1990s.
BODIES DISCOVERED
Iraqi soldiers, police and volunteers continued to pull bodies from the rubble of the devastated villages Thursday, August 16, in Nineveh province and hundreds of wounded were being treated at hospitals across the region.
"[House] Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi and [Senate] Majority Leader [Harry] Reid must remember an early withdrawal of American troops means genocide and extermination for non-Islamic traditions by the terrorists," said Mahoney, who last month led a prayer delegation in Iraq and met Iraqi government officials.
He said that besides religious minorities such as Tuesday’s targeted Yazidis, especially "hundreds of thousands of Christians," could face extermination if American forces leave. There has been growing pressure from Congress on President George W. Bush to announce a timetable for a US withdrawal, something he so far refused, saying this could embolden terrorists.
Most of the estimated 750,000 Iraqi Christians in Iraq in 2003 have left the country, mainly to Jordan and Syria, while some have reached the West, including the United States, in many cases after being smuggled across borders and through Mexico.
CASTING DOUBTS
Many of those remaining in the country have been seeking shelter in the Kurdish-controlled
area of northern Iraq, but the latest bombing caste doubts about their safety.
"We cannot allow 2,000 years of Christianity to be brutally removed from Iraq along with other faith traditions," warned Mahoney, adding that the "Congressional leadership must lay out a clear plan and agenda detailing how to protect religious freedom and liberty in Iraq."
The urgency was underscored by reports of more violence Thursday, August 16, when a car bomb exploded in Baghdad next to a shopping complex, reportedly killing at least seven people and wounding 15 others.
Just hours earlier on Wednesday, August 15, two American soldiers were killed and six wounded in fighting north of the Iraqi capital, the US military said. Despite the violence and reported persecution of religious minorities,
Christian missionaries have told BosNewsLife they managed to distribute 20,000 copies of the Bible’s New Testament in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. (With reporting from Iraq)
