Five Years Later, Where are the Christians in Iraq?
It's been exactly five years since President Bush gave the green light for the Iraq war, which, aside from toppling former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, has resulted in the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians from their ancestral homeland.
Christians have always been a minority in Iraq, making up only about three percent of the country’s population before the U.S.-led offensive in 2003. But their numbers plummeted thereafter, dropping from 1.2 million before the war to about 600,000 currently remaining in the country.
Besides security and economic concerns shared by all Iraqis, Christians face the additional burden of being targeted by extremists who mostly kidnap them in exchange for ransom money. Kidnappers are said to believe that Iraqi Christians have relatives living abroad and can easily request financial help from relatives to meet the ransom demand....