21 Facts About Iraqi Christians

The vast majority of Iraqi Christians are indigenous Eastern Aramaic-speaking ethnic Assyrians who claim descent from ancient Assyria, and follow the Syriac Christian tradition.

Non-Assyrian Iraqi Christians are largely Arab Christians and Armenians, and a very small minority of Kurdish, Shabaks and Iraqi Turkmen Christians.

Thousands of Iraqi Christians fled to the nation's capital where they found refuge and adequate housing, some of whom have chosen to make Baghdad their new permanent home following the full defeat of ISIS in Iraq.

Iraqi Christians noted that "some ten thousand families, comprising seventy thousand souls, were constantly moving across the border".

Over 2,000 Iraqi Christians were ethnically cleansed from their towns and villages during the Anfal campaign of 1988.

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Some Iraqi Christians were pressured to convert to Islam under threat of death or expulsion, and women were ordered to wear Islamic dress.

Iraqi Christians was kidnapped on 29 February 2008 when his bodyguards and driver were killed.

Iraqi Christians who are too poor or unwilling to leave their ancient homeland have fled mainly to Erbil, particularly to its Christian suburb of Ankawa.

Apart from emigration, the Iraqi Christians are declining due to lower rates of birth and higher death rates than their Muslim compatriots.

Iraqi Christians have been victim of executions, forced displacement campaigns, torture, violence and target of Sunni Islamist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Since the 2003 Iraq War, Iraqi Christians have fled from the country and their population has collapsed under the democratic government.

Iraqi Christians's body was later found, the priest's arms and legs had been cut off.

The reports stated that a number of Christians families who are moving to the Iraqi Kurdistan is growing and they were providing support and financial assistance for 11,000 of those families, and some are employed by the KRG.

Two months before the incident, 2 Iraqi Christians had been shot for unknown reasons in Baghdad and 2 other Iraqi Christians had been shot by a Sunni jihadist in Mosul.

In 2014, during the 2014 Northern Iraq offensive, the Islamic State of Iraq ordered all Christians in the area of its control, where the Iraqi Army collapsed, to pay a special tax of approximately $470 per family, convert to Sunni Islam, or die.

Additionally, several reports have been written about those Iraqi Christians who do not get "political" representation and therefore do not succeed in expanding their schools, and are shut out from all but the most basic funding.

Iraqi Christians explained this by saying that the KDP publicizes that tens of thousands of Christian Assyrian families are coming to the safety of the north from Arab areas, but "hundreds of thousands" of Christians are leaving the country entirely.

The goal of these tactics have been believed to be to push Shabak and Yazidi communities to identify as ethnic Kurds, and for Iraqi Christians to abide by the Kurdish government's plan of securing a Kurdish victory in any referendum concerning the future of the disputed territories.

The KRG funds private militias created ostensibly to protect minority communities from outside violence, in which Iraqi Christians authorities have failed, but which mainly serve to entrench Kurdish influence.

Iraqi Christians claimed that according to two refugees he interviewed, the "Kurds" had seized their lands and the Kurdistan Regional Government would not implement any decisions requiring the return of land to "original Assyrian inhabitants".

The majority of the Iraqi Christians belong to the branches of Syriac Christianity, whose followers are mostly ethnic Assyrians adhering to both the East Syriac Rite and West Syriac Rite:.