In the Telegraph article entitled
'Leave, crusaders, or have your heads cut off', Muslims from the Iraqi city of Mosul send their Arab Christian counterparts a traditional Islamic holiday invitation.
After months as a nervous bystander to the spiralling civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims, Iraq's Christian minority now faces the spectre of sectarian violence coming to their traditional home city. They fear that al Qaeda-backed zealots within the Sunni community, which forms the bulk of Mosul's one million population, want to end nearly 1,500 years of co-existence with an onslaught of ethnic cleansing.
As the article points out, the Christians of Mosul pre-dated the first Muslim inhabitant by over 5 centuries. Now the latecomers are asking their Arab brethren to split the premises. If not, there'll be "splitting" of another nature.
"A letter was delivered to my door with two bullets placed on top of it," said Mr Fadi, 32, standing watchfully in the neat garden of his two-storey villa. "It said: 'Leave, crusaders, or we will cut your heads off.' They want us to go from Mosul completely."
Um, I'm not getting the connection between bullets and "we will cut your heads off." Isn't that akin to mixing your metaphors?
"Our children are told by other pupils that they are '[expletive] spies' who have brought the Christian occupation to Iraq," said Father Shamoun Butris, a Christian minister in Mosul. "It is not true, but makes no -difference..."
Despite feeling vulnerable, many Christians are reluctant to complain. Canon Andrew White, a British clergyman based in the Green Zone who administers to a 1,000-strong congregation at St George's Anglican Church in Baghdad, said: "Christians keep stressing to me that they do not want to over-emphasise what they are going through for fear of it escalating. But things are bad."
Not exactly a ringing endorsement for the self-described "religion of peace".
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