Unfortunately, this spectacular attack was only the latest chapter of attacks, killings, and persecution of Christians in Iraq. Nearly all of Iraq’s Jews left the country years ago. In 1948 about 120,000 Jews fled Iraq for the newly formed state of Israel. Now, less than 100 Jews remain in Iraq. The same fate for Christians seems to be inevitable.

Iraq is the home of one of the earliest Christian communities in the world over 2000 years old. Church tradition holds that the Apostle Thomas in the year 35 A.D. took the gospel and headed east after the death of Jesus. Some of the Christians speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

The last official Iraq census in 1987 counted 1.4 million Christians in the country, about 800,000 remained when the US invaded Iraq in 2003. Verifiable numbers of Iraqi refugees are difficult to determine; various sources say that Christian refugees represent 40–50 % of the total Iraqi refugees even though Christians only represented 3% of the Iraqi population.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that between 300,000 and 400,000 Christians have been forced out of Iraq since 2003; others estimate a higher figure. Many of the Christians remaining in Iraq are displaced persons who were forced to flee to other possibly safer cities within Iraq.

For Christians in Iraq today, the possibility of martyrdom is an ever present reality, not an isolated event. One of the high profile cases occurred on February 29, 2008 when the Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Paul Faraj Rahho was ambushed, kidnapped and murdered.

In April 2010, even before the current massacre, the Telegraph newspaper in England reported: “The campaign of violence against Christians is one of the most under-reported stories of Iraq since the invasion of 2003.”