Mosul archbishop pleads: ‘Save us!’

AS THE jihadist terrorist group Isis claimed last Monday that it is establishing a caliphate or Islamic state on the territories it controls in Iraq and Syria, the Syrian Catholic Archbishop of Mosul appealed to international politicians and organisations to “save us!”

He asked them “to intervene immediately to put a stop to the deterioration of the situation, working not only at a humanitarian level, but also politically and diplomatically”. Archbishop Yohanna Petros Moshe of Mosul was speaking as Qaraqosh, the Christian-majority town in northern Iraq, 25 miles from Mosul, that became “almost a ghost town” after 10,000 people fled when it was attacked with mortar shells on 27 June. Archbishop Moshe reported that people had “fled from their homes in a few hours, taking with them only the clothes they were wearing”. Syriac Catholic priest Nizar Semaan, who works with Archbishop Moshe, underlined that “the archbishop does not ask to resolve the situation by sending more weapons to the Middle East”.