Iraqis go the polls on Saturday (12 May) for the first time since the military defeat of Islamic State, whose campaign of terror against non-Muslims pushed thousands of the country’s last Christians to flee their homeland.
Only about 200,000 to 300,000 Christians are thought to remain in Iraq now, mostly in the Nineveh Plains and the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in the country’s north. Around 700,000 emigrated in the violent years that have followed the 2003 US-led invasion and the 2014 appearance of IS, and tens of thousands more have fled to Kurdistan. Politically weak, Christians will be hoping the election process helps rather than hinders the country’s slow progress towards peace.
The vote is going ahead despite a plea from Sunni and Kurdish MPs to delay it to allow more time for people to return home. It has already been postponed from last September, when the military action against IS was ongoing. More than 2.3 million Iraqis, mainly Sunni Muslims but also tens of thousands of Christians, remain displaced. Many of the displaced Sunnis are in camps around the former IS strongholds of Mosul and the western Anbar region, and in Anbar the army is still sporadically attacked by IS jihadists.
However, a spokesman for the Iraqi Embassy in London told World Watch Monitor that displaced Iraqis would be able to vote as long as they had the required form of identification….
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