Heads of churches in Mosul urge media to stop stirring up sectarianism

NINEWA / IraqiNews.com: Heads of churches in the city of Mosul called on their followers to stay calm, urging mass media to stop stirring up sectarian tension among all Iraqis, a statement said on Tuesday. “They also called Muslims scholars to increase efforts to calm down the situation and urge citizens to respect principles of religious freedom,” said the statement received by IraqiNews.com. “Recent threats against Christians in Mosul scared them and forced a number of Christian families to leave their house, jobs and headed for neighboring villages and towns,” it added. At least 12 Christians have been murdered in Mosul over the past two weeks, a number of Christian homes have been destroyed, and hundreds of families have fled. “We Christians have always lived with and continue to coexist with our Muslim brothers, in the same country in a climate of peace and fraternity and a spirit of affection and cooperation,” the statement added. The targeted killings of Christians in Mosul have forced around 1,000 Christian families to leave their homes and seek sanctuary in safer areas. The Chaldean Catholic Church is one of the oldest Christian churches in the world, but hundreds of thousands of Christians have been forced to flee Iraq to escape the violence and the economic crisis caused by the war. There are now around 800,000 Christians in Iraq, compared with over a million before the US invasion in 2003, according to censuses carried out by the country’s dioceses. Christians, most from the early Assyrian sect and Catholic Chaldean churches, immigrated from northern Iraqi mountainous villages to Ninewa, Baghdad, and Basra during the Ottoman reign. Mosul, the capital city of Ninewa, lies 405 km north of Baghdad. The original city of Mosul stands on the west bank of the Tigris River, opposite the ancient biblical city of Nineveh on the east bank, but the metropolitan area has now grown to encompass substantial areas on both banks, with five bridges linking the two sides. Despite having an amount of Kurdish population, it does not form part of the area controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government Kurdistan RegionG). There are different communities in Mosul like Christians, Shiites and Kurds along with a Sunni majority. The city is also a historic center for the Nestorian Christianity of the Assyrians, containing the tombs of several Old Testament prophets such as Jonah, Yunus in Arabic, and Nahum. SH (I) 1