BAGHDAD
— By 1 p.m. on Friday almost every Christian in Mosul had heard the
Sunni militants’ message — they had until noon Saturday to leave the
city.
Men,
women and children piled into neighbors’ cars, some begged for rides to
the city limits and hoped to get taxis to the nearest Christian
villages. They took nothing more than the clothes on their backs,
according to several who were reached late Friday.
The
order from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria came after Christians
decided not to attend a meeting that ISIS had arranged for Thursday
night to discuss their status.
“We
were so afraid to go,” said Duraid Hikmat, an expert on minorities who
had done research for years in Mosul. He fled two weeks ago to Al Qosh, a
largely Christian town barely an hour away, but his extended family
left on Friday.
Since 2003, when Saddam Hussein was ousted, Mosul’s Christians, one of
the oldest communities of its kind in the world, had seen their numbers
dwindle from over 30,000 to just a few thousand, but once ISIS swept
into the city in early June, there were reports that the remaining
Christians had fled.
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