Signs of Christmas are more visible than ever across Iraq this year, but the needs of its small Christian minority have been overlooked, the head of the Chaldean Catholic Church has said.
The government needs to do more to protect Christians and ensure they have equal rights, Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako told The National.
The size of Iraq’s Christian population has dropped steadily in recent decades, as many of its members have emigrated to escape a succession of conflicts that have wracked the country, most recently during the war against ISIS from 2014 to 2017.
Thousands of Christians were forced to flee after the extremist group seized large areas of northern and western Iraq. Many of them are still waiting to return to their homes in the northern Nineveh Plains, eight years after Iraq declared victory over ISIS.
Cardinal Sako said Iraqi Christians have been subjected to kidnapping, killing, exclusion, marginalisation and mass displacement from their towns. Over the past two decades, the population has dropped from about 1.5 million to less than a third of that number as people left the country to find better living conditions, he said.
“We have the freedom to pray in our churches but we are not seen as equal citizens to other Iraqis.
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