What Iraq needs to do to protect minorities
Iraq is losing many of its minorities, and it’s on the brink of losing most of its cultural diversity. Despite this tragic situation, minorities are denied adequate protection and support by the Iraqi government, while the international community is failing to take any serious measures to protect them. They have been abandoned to their own fate […]Ali Mamouri writes for Al Monitor:
Iraq is losing many of its minorities, and it’s on the brink of losing most of its cultural diversity. Despite this tragic situation, minorities are denied adequate protection and support by the Iraqi government, while the international community is failing to take any serious measures to protect them. They have been abandoned to their own fate in a country expelling its population. In the early 1900s, the Jewish community in Iraq was one of the largest minorities in the Middle East. According to a statistical study (to which the author contributed) conducted in 2011 by Masarat, an organization that focuses on minorities in Iraq, six Jews remain in Iraq.
The study added that there are nearly 240,000 Christians out of more than 1 million who were present during Iraq’s invasion in 2003, and nearly 5,000 Mandaeans, who numbered 50,000 in 2003. The number of Yazidis dropped from almost half a million in 2003 to a small undeclared number (there are no official statistics on the current number of Yazidis), following the massacre they were subjected to by the Islamic State (IS) in 2014.
