Nina Shea on Iraq and Christians on National Review Online

Nina Shea on Iraq and Christians on National Review Online: "Iraq's Christians have long been a persecuted and marginalized religious and ethnic minority. In August 1933, soon after the formation of the Iraqi state, several thousand Assyrians were massacred by the army in Semele and other villages north of Mosul. One Iraqi-American told me he came all the way from his home in California to the Washington conference in memory of his great grandmother and her mother, both of whom had been beheaded in the not-so-good old days. Over 200 Chaldean and Assyrian villages were destroyed under Baathist rule, especially during the Anfal campaign of 1987-88 when, as the Iraq-Iran war was winding down, Saddam Hussein undertook a ruthless military offensive against perceived domestic opponents in the north. In 1977, Hussein eliminated the Chaldeans and Assyrians from the census, forcing them to register as either Kurds or Arabs. Such attacks and relentless discrimination between the 1960s and the fall of Hussein regime drove a full half of Iraq's indigenous Christians into the diaspora. "