Andrew White, who is also vicar of St. George’s Anglican Church in Baghdad, told The Jerusalem Post news paper that the eight Jews want to flee as "due to terrorist threats the situation has become dire" for Iraq’s 2,600-year-old Jewish community, which 100 years ago made up a third of the Iraqi capital’s population.
The eight Jews had hoped to flee to the Netherlands because they have relatives living there who arrived from Iraq in the country via Israel, following the first Gulf War, he explained.
However, White said the Dutch Embassy, which also represents Israel’s interest, ignored requests for visas needed to immigrate. "We’re talking about eight people," he said. "[The Dutch] should be receptive, but they’re not."
"INFORMAL MEETINGS"
Dutch Foreign Ministry spokesman Rob Dekker reportedly confirmed there had been "informal meetings" between White and a former Dutch ambassador to Baghdad.
Dekker said the Dutch Embassy in Baghdad was not equipped to handle the visa requests, and that the eight Jews would have to travel to Jordan or Syria to request visas. He acknowledged that their classification as Jews in their passports might not grant them safe passage to Damascus or Amman, but said these procedures "applied to everyone in Iraq," regardless of religion.
Dekker said in a statement that asylum could not be given either, and could only be requested from the Netherlands. "Dutch law does not allow for asylum requests from Dutch embassies," he reportedly said.
Baghdad’s Jews have been leaving for North America, Europe and Israel for 60 years, most recently in 2003, when a few Jews left just after US and British troops invaded Iraq, The Jerusalem Post reported.
THOUSANDS LEFT
Following Israel ‘s independence in 1948, about 100,000 Iraqi Jews were brought into the newly created Jewish state. The community is believed to have been present in Iraq since the Babylonian exile, mentioned in the Bible, following the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem.
Besides Jews, Iraqi Christians are also threatened by suspected Muslim militants, said Open Doors, a Christian rights group working in the region. In one of the latest reported incidents Iraqi Christian dentist, identified under his pseudonym Shamir was forced to flee his home in Baghdad with his wife and children this month after receiving a letter condemning him for not being a Muslim.
Attached to the letter was a DVD in which a man, claiming to be a Christian, was beheaded, well-informed Open Doors said. The letter said that “he was impure because he was not a Muslim. It said he should leave the country immediately or face the consequences. And if he and his family hadn’t left their house within eight hours, they would die," the group added.
The dentist and his family now live in a Kurdish village in Iraq’s Kurdistan area, where the children can not go to school because they do not speak the language, Open Doors said.
MORE REFUGEES
In published remarks, Open Doors said it estimates about 3,000 refugees flee each day to northern Iraq, and 40 percent of those are Christians. However the situation didn’t appear safe in northern Iraq Wednesday, August 22, as Iraqi police said a suicide truck bomb attack has killed at least 20 people. Authorities said the truck exploded at a police station in the city of Baiji. Several people were also wounded, the Voice of America (VOA) reported.
It came at an already difficult day for the US military which said an American helicopter crash Wednesday, August 22, also in northern Iraq, killed all 14 soldiers aboard. VOA quoted the military as saying that initial indications are that the aircraft had a mechanical malfunction. The military did not specify the location of the crash.
The latest US losses came as the death toll from a series of truck bombs last week targeting members of the ethnic Kurdish Yazidi minority near Sinjar and al-Jazira on the Syrian border rose to more than 500 dead and 1500 wounded, making it the bloodiest co-coordinated attack since the US-led invasion in 2003, news reports said. (With additional reporting by BosNewsLife Senior Special Correspondent Eric Leijenaar from the Netherlands, and BosNewsLife’s Stefan J. Bos).
