ishtartv.com - christiantoday.com
Carey Lodge , 10
October 2016
A
church in Iraq was blown up by Islamic State militants on Sunday, ARA News
reports.
"Daesh
[ISIS] jihadis detonated a number of explosive devices inside the church on
Sunday afternoon," a human rights activist, Ghazi Shamoun, told the website.
He
said the Barbara Fouq Attal Church in Karemlis, near Mosul, was "destroyed
completely".
Karemlis
is an Assyrian Christian-majority town on the Nineveh Plain. Its Christian
population fled when ISIS overran the region in 2014, leaving churches and
other religious buildings empty.
"The
terrorist group has destroyed dozens of Assyrian churches and archeological
sites in Nineveh in a bid to eliminate the historical identity of the
area," Shamoun said.
Afram
Yakoub, of the Assyrian Confederation of Europe, told Christian Today:
"The destruction of the Assyrian church in the Nineveh plain is yet
another crime against cultural heritage and an example of ongoing ethnic and
religious cleansing the Assyrians are facing.
"Unfortunately
Assyrians are still left on their own in the face of evil."
Yakoub
crticised Western governments for not sending military aid to support the
Assyrian force The Nineveh Plain Protection Units (NPU).
"The
only way to stop further ethnic cleansing and destruction of churches and other
heritage sites in northern Iraq is to empower Assyrians and Yazidis in every
possible way," he said.
Looting
and bulldozing ancient sites has become one of the hallmarks of ISIS' ruthless
attempt to create its caliphate across Iraq and Syria.
The
Assyrian city of Nimrud was looted and much of it bulldozed in March 2015 and
ISIS militants blew up a 2,800-year-old temple in the city earlier this year.
Dr
Nicholas Al-Jeloo, a lecturer in Syriac at the University of Melbourne, told
Christian Today after the destruction of the Temple of Nabu that ISIS'
targeting of ancient Assyrian sites was devastating for the community.
"If
all their churches and the ancient sites belonging to their ancestors have been
destroyed, then for these people the land no longer bears their identity, and
this is a very profound thing," he said.
"People
might say it's the world's heritage that is being destroyed, and that's true,
but it's also the heritage of the locality and the people who identify with it
and with having lived there for thousands of years. This is, in fact,
contributing to the genocide against the Assyrians."
An
ancient branch of Christianity, the Assyrian Church of the East has roots
dating back to the 1st century AD. Assyrian Christians speak Aramaic, the
language of Jesus, and have origins in ancient Mesopotamia – a territory which
is now spread over modern day northern Iraq, north-east Syria and south-eastern
Turkey.
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