Agency seeks donations for emergency aid for fleeing Iraqi Christians
A US-based international Catholic agency has issued a plea for emergency funds to help tens of thousands of Christians forced to flee their homes in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
“These Christian families have arrived with only their clothes, having been forced to leave everything behind in Mosul,” said Ra’ed Bahou, the Catholic Near East Welfare Association’s (CNEWA) regional director for Jordan and Iraq.
As families were “fleeing the city on foot,” he said, “ISIS militants stole whatever dollars they had in their pockets, even their passports and identification papers.”
Bahou made the comments in a news release from CNEWA announcing the agency has launched a campaign to rush funds to the families.
The Islamic State fighters, a group of militant Islamists formerly known as ISIS, have solidified their control over Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul by imposing Shariah, Islamic law, and have ordered Christians to convert to Islam, pay a special tax or be killed.
Mosul’s Christians have instead fled to the Christian villages of Ninevah province, some just a few miles from Mosul, or to the autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq.
An agency of the Holy See, CNEWA works throughout the Middle East, with offices in Amman, Jordan, Beirut and Jerusalem. It has been active in Iraq for more than 50 years, but redoubled its efforts among the vulnerable Christian population in 1991.
“Christian families have found refuge in churches, convents and monasteries,” Bahou added.
With the Syrian Catholic Archbishop Yohanna Moshe of Mosul and the Dominican Sisters of St Catherine of Siena, who are homeless themselves, the clergy, religious and villagers are trying to provide basic necessities, said the CNEWA release. It said refuge, especially in the villages of Alqosh, Bakhdida (Qaraqosh), Bartella and Tel Kaif, is “tenuous at best,” because the Islamic State has cut the electricity and water supply and has announced its intentions to overrun the region.
“These villages are in the hands of God,” Bahou said, “as ISIS says their next ‘gift’ will be the villages of the Ninevah Plain.”
Monsignor John E Kozar, the president of CNEWA, said the agency will get the emergency funds to the bishops, clergy and religious, “who in the frenzy are courageously providing water, food, mattresses and medicines” to fleeing Christians.
The world is “witnessing, at the hands of extremist thugs, the eradication of a cradle of Christianity in the cradle of civilization,” the priest said in a statement.
He added that the agency will help the “shepherds of this flock to tend their sheep, with the basics they need for survival now, even if their flock is dispersed.”
The BBC reported on July 28 that in a joint message, France’s foreign minister and interior minister have offered Iraqi Christians asylum. “We are ready, if they so desire, to help facilitate asylum on our territory,” their statement said.
Donations can be made at the CNEWA website.
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