Louis Raphael Sako, Chaldean Patriarch speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Baghdad, Iraq, on Monday, Dec. 18, 2017. KHALID MOHAMMED/AP
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By
SINAN SALAHEDDIN, December 19, 2017
BAGHDAD
— As Iraq emerges from more than three years of war with the Islamic State
group, battling an extremist "mentality" will be the key to peaceful
coexistence among the country's religious and ethnic groups, the top Chaldean
Catholic Church official tells The Associated Press.
Patriarch
Louis Raphael Sako, leader of the Iraq-based church, also appealed for an end
to discrimination against Christians in Iraq and the reconstruction of
Christian areas in the country's north left in ruins by the war to enable
Christian families to return.
Once
a vibrant community that enjoyed protection and near equal rights with the
Muslim majority under the rule of Saddam Hussein, the number of Iraq's
Christians has steadily dwindled since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion as they have
been targeted by Islamic militants, forcing the majority to flee the country.
During
the Islamic State group's onslaught across northern and western Iraq in 2014,
thousands of Christians in Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital,
fled as the extremists forced them to convert to Islam or pay a special tax,
and often confiscated their property.
"They
have this feeling that Islam is the completion of religion, is the only true
religion and the others have been falsified," Sako told the AP on Monday
at the headquarters of the Chaldean Catholic Patriarchate of Babylon, based in
Baghdad.
"This
is very bad this mentality," he said.
Since
2003, the number of Christians in Iraq has decreased to around half a million
from an estimated 1.5 million, Sako lamented. Among the more than 3 million
people who have been displaced inside the country since 2014 are 120,000
Christians, all of them aided by the Church as "the government gave
nothing," he said.
"We
feel that we are marginalized ... this is our land, we were here before the
arrival of Islam and here the majority was Christians," Sako said.
Some
Christians managed to return to villages and towns in Nineveh Plain outside
Mosul, but none have yet returned to the city itself, where 25 churches
suffered damage and were ransacked, he said.
"Now,
what we are expecting as Christians, but also as Iraqis, from the government
and also the international community is security and stability, also the
construction of the villages, infrastructure, houses, but the priority is for
security and stability otherwise people are not going back home," he said.
"This
is the responsibility of the Iraqi government, but it is also the
(responsibility of the) international community and especially it is the moral
responsibility of America for they are also the reason behind what we lived out
during 15 years after 2003," the patriarch said, referring to the year of
the U.S.-led invasion.
The
Iraqi government has declared the war against IS over after driving the
extremists from all territory they controlled in 2014, but discrimination
against Christians by Muslims has not ended, Sako said.
During
a Friday sermon in the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, which was never under
Islamic State control, a Sunni cleric described Christians as
"infidels" and called on Muslims not to take part in Christmas
celebrations and not to congratulate the Christians on the occasion.
The
same statements are also coming out from some mosques in the northern Kurdish
self-ruled region, Sako said.
"This
is bad, they are spreading hatred, this is not religion," he said.
Asked
whether such mentality is a major obstacle toward reconciliation in the
country, Sako said: "Yeah, sure."
"Daesh
is done geographically, but it is not done yet ideologically," he warned,
using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. "So all efforts must come
together to change the concept of Daesh or Daesh interpretations, change the
mentality, change the culture."
Sako
called on Muslim leaders to "update" their religious messages and
interpretations.
"We
are not as it was in the middle ages," he said. "I think we are all
brothers and sisters, we have to respect each other beyond our religion or
ethnicity."
Sako
called for reconsidering the "unjust" laws and constitution articles
that deal with minorities in Iraq as well as the education curriculums that
should give a space for the history and heritage of Christianity as "it
never mentions our history and heritage, which goes back 700 years before
Islam."
"This
is a kind of genocide," he said. "Genocide does not necessarily mean
we kill each other but it can also be achieved by erasing the memory."
"I
think we need today to change the mentality of the culture, the education at
the schools, media and look for a roadmap for the future of Iraq, but for all
together not only for a group against other group," he added.
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