Persecuted Christians Flee Mosul in Ancient Nineveh

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Jonah was a Hebrew prophet of God sent to the people of Nineveh to preach repentance. Jonah was too ticked off at God to go because he said he knew God was so merciful and forgiving that if the people repented God wouldn't bring the destruction upon them that they so richly deserved (see the story of Jonah here) but He will forgive them. So Jonah took off in the opposite direction, to sea, and ended up in the belly of a whale. He should have been dead, but he survived long enough to repent of his disobedience, and went on to preach repentance to the wicked city and sure enough the people repented and God didn't punish them, much to Jonah's dismay.

Today, in Nineveh, in the city of Mosul, Christians are being persecuted and killed and they are leaving in droves. Leaving their homes and running for their lives. The killing of 12 Christians come on the heels of a protest against a law passed at the provincial elections last month which removed an article that would have given protection to Christians and other minorities.

As Yahoo! News reports: "Now the last safe haven for Christians is gone, said Canon Andrew White the vicar of St. George's church in Baghdad."

Last year the same thing happened in Baghdad (the killing of Christians) and the Christians there fled to the last safe place they knew, Mosul. Now there is no safe place left for Christians in Iraq.

"Christians are being killed in the only place they felt safe, in Nineveh," White said, referring to the province of which Mosul is the capital. "This is where they fled to and now there's no safe place for them."

The Christians of Iraq go back a long way - a long, long way. They can trace their heritage to the Assyrians and Chaldean of ancient Mesopotamia. So Christians in Iraq is not a novelty, its nothing new. They've been a fixture in this part of the Middle East since the early church.

Christians once were estimated to be about 3 percent of the Iraqi population or about 800,000 people.

But as Iraq grew bloody and violent the Christian community dwindled. Now some estimate that more than half of Iraq's Christians have fled. White believes that the Christian community is about a quarter of the estimated 800,000.

"It isn't easy for these people to leave," he said. "They have no representation... we need the Christian world to do something about it."

An additional commentary at the end of the report bears repeating:

"Killing the peaceful Christians is a crime and it doesn't pass without punishment," he said. According to Kashmoula, the killings were because of "the failure of the security plan and the fleeing of the elements of Al Qaida from Anbar to Mosul unchecked."

The Hammurabi Association for Human Rights released a statement demanding international attention to the assassinations of Christians likening it to "genocide."

"We call on the authorities, central and local and international to stop this Christian bloodshed and to contain the violations and violence and terrorism that Christians in Mosul are facing," the statement said.

"We also are victims of the civil war between Iraqis and the objective of the threats of Al Qaida is to displace Christians because they are a minority in Iraq ," said Salwan Khoshaba from Al Tahira Church in Mosul .

Lets see how long the UN sits and twiddles its thumbs before it does anything at all. As for the MSM doing anything about reporting this...well take a guess.