In Defense of Christians (IDC) President Toufic Baaklini made the following statement:
“Today marks the two-year anniversary of ISIS taking control of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. In the days and weeks that followed Mosul’s fall, ISIS overran the Nineveh Plain, the historic homeland of vulnerable ethnic and religious communities, in what has since been found to have been genocide. The region’s Christian communities – Assyrian, Chaldean, Syriac, and Armenian – were forced to flee for their lives.
“On August 6, 2014, Qaraqosh, known as the Christian capital of Iraq, fell to ISIS. The nearly seventy thousand residents of Qaraqosh fled. Qaraqosh remains in ISIS hands two years later, as do many other Christian cities and villages on the Nineveh Plain.
IDC recently visited the displaced Christians of Nineveh and witnessed the indignity of their conditions and of the genocide they suffered. Mr. Baaklini shared one poignant story of a woman who survived slavery under ISIS in an interview with Fox News last week.
“The most urgent need for the displaced victims of genocide today is to have their homeland liberated, their homes restored, and their rights protected by regional and national governments, with oversight from the international community.
“IDC calls upon the United States and the community of civilized nations to eradicate ISIS, to liberate ISIS-occupied portions of the Nineveh Plain, and to resettle and restore Nineveh’s indigenous communities to their homes.”