Vatican Advocates Military Action in Iraq

Military intervention in Iraq may be the only way to stop the genocide against the country's Christian minority by the Islamic State (formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS), a senior Vatican diplomat says.

"At this moment, we hope the voice that is surging from different Christian and religious communities, from moderate Muslims, from people of good will around the world, may find the response of concrete humanitarian assistance that is provided for the Christians in northern Iraq as well as some political and even effective military protection," Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's permanent observer to the United Nations told Vatican Radio.

This marks the first time a Vatican official has supported military action of any kind in recent memory. Pope John Paul II condemned the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

At least 100,000 Christians have fled their villages in the Nineveh plains of northern Iraq, according to Iraq's Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Sako. Last month, the Islamic State ordered Christians living in Mosul to pay the jizyah tax mandated by the Quran, convert to Islam, or face death.

Sako called the Islamic State's onslaught a "Way of the Cross" for Iraq's Christians who have been in the region since the beginnings of Christianity. They have been forced to flee on foot amid Iraq's summer heat.

"They are using the sword to cut off hand[s] and also beheading other[s] so I don't think this is the behavior of human beings, but wild animals do that," an Iraqi Christian refugee told CBN News.

Islamic State terrorists have looted the Christians' possessions – everything from dentures to wedding rings – leaving them destitute. Churches have been burned or converted into mosques. Ancient Christian manuscripts also have been burned, and Christian symbols have been desecrated.

"They are killing our people in the name of Allah and telling people that anyone who kills a Christian will go straight to heaven," Archbishop Toma Dawod of the Syrian Orthodox Church told U.K.'s The Guardian newspaper following the fall of Qaraqosh, which had been Iraq's largest Christian city, to the Islamic State.

Archbishop Tomasi also complained that a "certain indifference" to Christian suffering in Iraq existed in the international community.

"It is difficult to convince—because of false modesty, I would say—the Western powers to take a strong stance in defense of the Christians," Tomasi said.

This stance was echoed by Sako, who complained that President Obama's decision to bomb Islamic State artillery positions near the Kurdish region was inadequate and that humanitarian aid alone was insufficient.

"The position of the American President Obama to only give military assistance to protect Erbil is disappointing," Sako wrote. "The Americans are not up to a rapid solution to give hope specifically as they are not going to attack ISIS in Mosul and in the Nineveh plain.

"There is no strategy to dry up the sources of manpower and the resources of these Islamic terrorists."

Reader comments on this item

stop the killing in iraq of christians

Submitted by why do not UNO stop the innocent christians killing, Aug 12, 2014 19:00

plz atack on the Iraqi Dogs they are killing our christians women and raped them and killing the childrens ...my God help them through the chrsitian forces ...i request ti the super power attack over them and escape the christian people

Long overdue & too late

Submitted by Geppetto, Aug 12, 2014 17:00

This Christian genocide being committed by Orthodox Muslims in the Middle East especially, and elsewhere where Muslims have a significant presence, is not new news for anyone that has not had their head in the sand since the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. These Vatican Advocates are to a great extent responsible for the global ignorance surrounding these atrocities, an inattentive posture shared by western governments and media who've succumbed to the politically correct pressure put on them by Muslim Brotherhood front groups like CAIR, ISNA, IIIT, MSA, MAS, etc., etc. and the generally benign view of Islam these groups have very successfully created.

Warning bells have been sounding with increasing volume and frequency from individuals and groups that the aforementioned Brotherhood organizations have successfully labeled as Islamophobes, equivalent to psychotic Atheists who should not be tolerated and must be ignored as a lunatic fringe. Despite all of the atrocities that have and are being committed by Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, Boko Haram, etc. Muslims all, steeped in a strict interpretation of the Quran and Hadiths, it is not until the advent of ISIS/ISIL now the IS Caliphate, their blatantly horrific acts of violence and brutality and open threats to plant their black flag over the White House does the world even begin to consider that so called radical Islam might not be a threat manufactured by religious bigots but a very real threat characterized by all the acts of violence the west still finds so difficult to believe could exist in the modern world.

These advocates are a welcome, long overdue and much needed voice on the world stage with regard to this threat but would it not be of interest to know who they expect to face this threat head on? The U. S. military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan will fail abysmally because of an inability to make an accurate determination so absolutely necessary to achieve victory in any military engagement, exactly who is the enemy? Iraq is now falling apart. Afghanistan will likely follow when Obama fulfills his promised troop withdrawal.

These fanatics will never be defeated by rules of engagement that use the most powerful and capable military on the planet as social service workers who're focused on wining the hearts and minds of a culture that has nothing but contempt for a western culture they deem as inferior, decadent and evil incarnate.

So who will confront this rising tide of Muslim fanatics now? Whoever steps up, and some will definitely need to, will face a much, much more difficult task because the west did its very best to avoid this conflict which history will determine to be a much bigger blood bath because of that posture of appeasement.

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