Christians flee violence in Mosul

The international community should stay out of efforts to halt the insurgency by militia who have seized control of a number of Iraq’s northern cities, Baghdad’s Latin-rite archbishop has said.

Catholic Archbishop Jean Sleiman was speaking days after hundreds of gunmen from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) seized control of the city of Mosul, prompting the archbishop there to say he feared its centuries-old Christian population had fled for good. Archbishop Sleiman said rather that Iraqi leaders needed to work together to stop Isis. “That is more important than getting the international community involved,” he said.

“The international community should think of the common good. They should think of peace,” he told the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN).

Mosul, the country’s second city which houses the Tomb of Jonah and Iraq’s oldest Christian monastery, is now all but empty of its Chaldean, Assyrian and Armenian communities which numbered 35,000 before the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Last week, its last few thousand Christians fled the city, many to the relative safety of surrounding towns and villages. The Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Mosul, Amel Nona, told ACN: “We received threats … [and] now all the faithful have fled the city. I wonder if they will ever return.”

Some 160 families have taken refuge in the village of Al-Qosh just outside the autonomous Kurdish zone of northern Iraq. Kurdish Peshmerga fighters have moved into the town to protect it.

A Kurdish news agency reported that the papal nuncio to Iraq said priests were being allowed in to Mosul to tend to remaining Christians.