The Christian community in Iraq, and other minority faiths, have been \u201cbroken and scattered\u201d by two decades of violence and suffering \u2013 from the 2003 US-UK invasion and warfare, through ISIS terror, to today\u2019s \u201cdaily life discrimination\u2019 under the Islamist Iraqi government imposing sharia law.<\/p>\n
Such was the sober assessment of Archimandrite Emanuel Youkhana of the ancient Assyrian Church of the East, a Christian humanitarian aid pioneer in Iraq, at the recent Edinburgh \u2018Scotland Day\u2019 of Embrace the Middle East, which supports his work.<\/p>\n
Over these years the Church in Iraq has diminished from 3.2 per cent of the population in 2003 to a mere 0.1 per cent today \u2013 through death and diaspora.<\/p>\n
The post-invasion collapse of all functioning government left religious minorities as \u2018soft targets\u2019 for Muslim terrorists: shops, churches and other institutions of Christians and Yazidis were destroyed; many thousands of Christian families fled Iraq to escape ongoing war, usually going to Jordan or Europe. Some returned when the situation seemed settled, but ISIS\u2019 seizure of two-thirds of Iraq in 2014 saw thousands of Christians slaughtered and raped under its terror.<\/p>\n