Signed by Chomer and Taimoorazy, founder and president of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council, it read in part:
“Mr. President, we urge you to resist pressure to withdraw all troops from Iraq. Recent blood-soaked history has shown that without such a presence, the history of Assyrians and Yazidis on their ancient lands would end.”
Today, there are only a reported 2,500 US soldiers left in Iraq. But for the battered and depleted Assyrian Christians and the Yazidis, two minorities who live side-by-side peacefully, a total pullout by the US could mean the demise of two ancient peoples in the Nineveh plains.
In 2003, about the time of the invasion of Iraq, there were 1.5 million Assyrian Christians, who are among the world’s oldest Christian communities, in the world. Today, there remain 150,000 Assyrian Christians in their homeland. The numbers of Yazidis shrank from 600,000 to 400,000.
The greatest disaster for both was the ascendancy of ISIS, the world’s most brutal terrorist groups. ISIS was able to fill a void left by the US; a void with beheadings, murders, pillaging and rapes. That void was created when, in 2011, then-President Obama decided to remove all 45,000 remaining US forces from Iraq.
On November 29 of that year, then-Vice President Joe Biden declared during an official visit to Iraq: “We are embarking on a new... and a comprehensive relationship between the United States and Iraq as sovereign partners.” Biden made the remarks after meeting with then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other Iraqi officials.
Apparently, ISIS never got the memo. READ MORE
