“Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total…because it may well involve the whole world.” Jean Paul Sartre
It never rains in California; except when it does.
Dark clouds spewed sheets of rain onto the parking lot beside Saint Peter’s Chaldean Catholic Cathedral. Water bouncing back from the pavement obscured the buildings in an odd way, as though one was looking through a portal into another world where only the power of believing kept it all there.
Chaldeans are proud of their history which goes back centuries before the birth of Christianity to Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers now known as Iraq. Once called the Fertile Crescent or The Cradle of Civilization, ancient Mesopotamia produced the prologue to western civil law under King Hammurabi, (1792-1750 B.C) called The Hammurabi Code. Every history student learns about the rose-colored city of Babylon with its magnificent Hanging Gardens, created by King Nebuchadnezzar II, (605-592 B.C.) The ancient Epic of Gilgamesh – the king who searched for immortality – is a legendary poem that originated in the Assyrian city of Uruk that once flourished in the northern part of Mesopotamia. Archeologists believe it was written 2500 years before the birth of Jesus.
In this age of advertiser-designed opinion, many in the world Christian flock appear to have lost faith in their dead saints as shown by dwindling numbers of church goers in the West.
However, in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq today, losing faith is the least of a Christian’s worry; there’s a daily threat of being slaughtered by fanatics for not being a Muslim. Aside from the murder of Christians as well as other minorities, Muslim extremists have resorted to burning churches and cathedrals, selling girls of all ages including babies into slavery, and killing anyone who disagrees with them. (2015 United Nations Report.)
(Photo of executed men reportedly from the Islamic State (IS) Media Department.)
Refugees, who survived the recent raping and killings in Iraq and Syria at the hands of the terrorists of IS, report that Christians and minorities in the Northern Iraqi towns of Mosul and Tikrit were given the choice of conversion to Islam or death. In the end, faith was all they had as they ran away from their homes with little more than the clothes on their backs.
Civilians fled the carnage and travelled north across the desert to the Kurdish region where camps are now home to hundreds of thousands. Before the 2nd Gulf war and the fall of Dictator, Saddam Hussein, there were 1.5 million Christians in Iraq. Once Hussein was ousted, the tight lid that he'd held down on a pressure-cooker of religious and tribal discontent was thrown off. More than 30 years of fomenting hatred between Muslim tribes bubbled up and over the top in 2003. Since then, various factions have considered it a kind of perverted duty to kill Christians.
The result was a mass exodus which has pushed Christianity in Iraq to the brink of extinction. An estimated 300,000 Christians remain in all of the country. Of 60,000 Christians that lived in Mosul before the summer of 2014 and the IS occupation, there are reportedly less than 200 remaining - the ones who were too sick or too old to flee.
In spite of the ongoing terrorist campaign to wipe out Christianity in Iraq, the Patriarch of Chaldean Catholics worldwide, Louis Raphael Sako, has ordered at least six monks and 8 priests to return to Iraq, stating that they left without permission. One source reported that the Patriarch has persuaded Iraqi government officials not to issue visas to Christians who want to leave the country.
