The Christian population in Iraq has now diminished to an alarming 50,000 to 250,000, compared with 1.4 million in 2003. They were either massacred by jihadists or abducted.

Christians have faced being forced to convert to Islam, pay a high living tax (jizya, mandated in the Qur’an) to the Islamic State, or abandon their ancestral homes. Many were enslaved or murdered.

Reverend Canon Andrew White, (aka “The Vicar of Baghdad”) known for his love of humanity, stated of Islamic State jihadists: “When I invited ISIL to dinner they said, ‘Yes, we’ll come, but we’ll chop off your head.’ Rather kind of them to warn me.”

The gentle and kind Reverend White, whom I have personally interviewed many times, has witnessed the worst atrocities on the ground against his fellow Christians, minorities and Yazidi girls who are taken as sex slaves, and he finally declared:

“I have looked through the Quran trying to find forgiveness… there isn’t any. If you find it, tell me. This makes it very difficult to talk to ISIS because they can show you quite clearly that it is what Allah wants. They can justify their position when Allah says you should combat and fight the infidel and they say, ‘Well, these are infidels.’ So the question is, how can you prove that these are not infidels? And you can’t.”

“Christian Iraqi Population Shrinking; Persecution ‘Worse Than Under Saddam Hussein’”, by Stoyan Zaimov, Christian Post, June 5, 2016: