CBN | Aug. 22, 2018
Christian refugees flee from ISIS (Erbil, Iraq, summer 2014). (Credit: Stivan Shany)
It was four years ago this month when some 140,000 Christians were facing mass exodus as ISIS militants converged on Iraq’s ancient Nineveh Plains.
“The program was to eliminate the population and to also eliminate the historical memory — to get the people who lived there out of there,” Andrew Walther of Knights of Columbus told CBN News.
For the past four years, the Knights of Columbus, the largest Catholic fraternal organization, has been working to help persecuted Middle East Christians. Walther says what took Iraq’s Christians millennia to build in the Nineveh Plains was lost in a matter of hours.
(Christian refugees flee from ISIS Credit: Stivan Shany)
“This is why they blew up Roman ruins in Palmyra. This is why they blew up the tomb of Jonah. This is why they had a systematic destruction of Christian cemeteries, of Christian churches, and the desecration of Christian graves,” Walther said.
For over 2000 years, Nineveh Plains was the historical homeland of Chaldean, Syriac and Assyrian Christians. ISIS emptied it within days.