Iraq
by tristero
Hundreds of Christians are fleeing Mosul in the wake of a string of killings that appear to be singling out Christians in the northern Iraqi city, where many had taken refuge from persecution in other parts of the country.
At least 11 and perhaps as many as 14 Christians have been killed in Mosul since the end of August, according to government officials and humanitarian groups. The victims have included a doctor, an engineer, two builders, two businessmen and a 15-year-old boy, who was shot dead in front of his house. In the last week alone, seven Christians were killed.
On Friday, a pharmacist was shot to death by a man who pretended to be an undercover police officer and asked for the man’s identification card, said Khisroo Koran, deputy governor of Nineveh Province, which is in northern Iraq. Mosul is the province’s capital.
Louis Sako, the archbishop of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Kirkuk, said Friday that the killings were an example of “a campaign of cleansing, killing and threatening” that Christians faced in Iraq….
In Sadr City on Friday, thousands of followers of the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr shouted anti-American slogans as they marched along a funeral convoy carrying the body of Saleh al-Ugaili, a member of Parliament representing the Sadrist party who was killed on Thursday by a roadside bomb.
In a statement, Mr. Sadr blamed the United States for Mr. Ugaili’s death. The United States Embassy and the American military condemned the killing as “an attack on against Iraq’s democratic institutions.”
Also on Friday, a car bomb exploded in the Abu Dshir neighborhood of Baghdad, killing at least 12 people.
There’s something dreadful about that last sentence, appended at the end of the article, just a footnote to the epic carnage unleashed by George W. Bush – aided and abetted by the American media, most of the foreign policy establishment who either signed on or kept their traps shut, and some 2/3rds of the American public. Those are 12 lives no less important than our own, nothing but an oh-by-the-way, soon to be forgotten by everyone except the survivors, who will never forget.
And who will blame all of us for opening the gates of Hell.