Torchlight vigils against persecution of Christians in Iraq

With torchlight vigils in front of churches, town halls or central squares members, friends and supporters of the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) are drawing attention today Thursday in the late afternoon to the shocking plight of the Christians in the Arab-dominated part of Iraq . Human rights workers in 35 towns and cities – from Altötting to Fehmarn, from Nuremberg to Weimar – are joining in the campaign and lighting candles for the Christian Assyro-Chaldaean-Aramaeans suffering under the systematic terror of fanatical Islamists. In some towns the vigils are being actively supported by parishes and ministers of religion.In Göttingen, for example, the tower trumpeter and the bell-ringer of the St Jacobikirche are accompanying the campaign with the Chorale „Out of the Deep I Cry to Thee” and in Münster the auxiliary bishop Friedrich Ostermann is visiting the vigil.

In many churches ministers are also providing information after their Advent services and concerts in their churches on the persecution of Christians in Iraq , are reporting on it in hundreds of parish newsletters or collecting signatures for the support of refugees. By attacks ands brutal murders, abductions, rape, bombing and death threats three quarters of the approximately 650,000 Assyro-Chaldean-Aramaeans who were still in the country before the outbreak of war in 2003 have been driven out of the country.

With this human rights campaign throughout the country the GfbV is calling on the German government to increase the humanitarian aid for the penniless Iraq refugees in the neighbouring countries of Syria and Jordan . Above all however the GfbV calls on the international community to protect the peaceful autonomous federal state of Iraqi Kurdistan as last refuge of the Christians in Iraq and to increase diplomatic and economic relations.

In Iraqi Kurdistan the situation is stable with ethnic and religious groups living peacefully together. However this peace is not secure. For the neighbouring country of Turkey , which denies basic rights to the Kurdish ethnic group and also the few adherents of the Christian communities in their own country, has several times threatened Iraqi Kurdistan in recent weeks with military action or actually conducted attacks.

In the following towns and cities there will be vigils (in those marked with * the campaign will for organisational reasons be held on another day):

84503 Altötting, 26871 Aschendorf*, 53111 Bonn, 79713 Bad Säckingen,

96049 Bamberg, 37139 Barterode*, Berlin, 30974 Bredenbeck*, 64283

Darmstadt, 78166 Donaueschingen, 44137 Dortmund, 40210 Düsseldorf,

85072 Eichstätt, 78234 Engen*, 23769 Fehmarn, 37073 Göttingen, 20095

Hamburg, 76185 Karlsruhe, 56070 Koblenz, Köln, 56112 Lahnstein, 21339

Lüneburg, 49324 Melle, 48159 Münster*, 90443 Nürnberg, 26871

Papenburg, 26180 Rastede, 74585 Rot am See, 78224 Singen, 38723

Seesen, 55576 Sprendlingen, 69168 Wiesloch, 38300 Wolfenbüttel, 99421

Weimar, 91791 Weißenburg