KIRKUK, Iraq: Thousands of Christians poured into Kurdistan as they fled a Saturday ultimatum by jihadists who overran northwestern Iraq last month and proclaimed a caliphate.
As militants attempted to break government defenses in strategic areas and edge closer to Baghdad, Christians joined hundreds of thousands of Shiite and other refugees into Kurdistan.
Their flight to the safety of the neighboring autonomous region coincided with the expected homecoming of Iraq’s Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, after 18 months of medical treatment in Germany.
The Islamic State (IS) group running Mosul had already demanded that those Christians still in the city convert, pay a special tax or leave but messages blaring on mosques’ loudspeakers appeared to spark an exodus.
An earlier statement by Mosul’s new rulers had said there would be “nothing for them but the sword” if Christians did not abide by those conditions before noon (0900 GMT) on Saturday.
“Christian families are on their way to Dohuk and Arbil” in Kurdistan, Chaldean patriarch Louis Sako, who heads Iraq’s largest Christian community, told AFP.
“For the first time in the history of Iraq, Mosul is now empty of Christians.”
Most Christians in the northwestern Nineveh province fled in terror after jihadist-led militants enforcing an extreme version of sharia — or Islamic law — launched an offensive on June 9.
But many of the poorest families returned when the fighting stopped and IS started administering the city. Sako put the number of Christians who were still in Mosul on Thursday at 25,000.
The Islamic State “seems intent on wiping out all traces of minority groups from areas it now controls in Iraq,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement Saturday.
Other minorities rooted in the same province of Nineveh have suffered even more than the Christians, according to crimes HRW documented against the Yazidis, as well as the Turkmen and Shabak Shiite communities.
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