Days of Terror: Iraqi Christians Live in Fear of ISIS

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/christian-iraqis-live-in-state-of-fear-of-isis-terrorists-a-976971.html



Some 40,000 Christians live in Qaraqosh, a town near Mosul, Iraq. Residents have been gathering daily in 12 local churches as ISIS jihadists advance towards the community. Their existence is a precarious one.

Days of Terror: Iraqi Christians Live in Fear of ISIS
By Katrin Kuntz in Qaraqosh, Iraq
June 26, 2014 – 04:18 PM

It was the evening of Tuesday, June 10 when Salam Kihkhwa walked into a mobile phone shop in the Qaraqosh city center to purchase more minutes for his phone. Kihkhwa surfs the Internet for several hours each day and was carrying an iPhone 5s in his hand as he navigated his way past brackish puddles on the edge of the road. He set a few wrinkled dinar notes down on the counter to pay for a pack of Winchesters. Just at that moment, he recalls, he heard the scream: "The jihadists are in the city!"

Salam no longer remembers where the scream came from or whether it was a man or a woman. But he knows he left his cigarettes and money on the counter, grabbed his phone and made a run for it. Hundreds of others joined him, and the crowd kept swelling as it dashed through the streets of Qaraqosh.

"They're coming," the people fleeing yelled, warning others along the way. They ran into their houses -- and the bells of Qaraqosh's 12 churches began to ring.

Yet the day that the residents of Qaraqosh thought that the radical Islamist militia of terrorist Abu Bakr a-Baghdadi had entered the city turned out to be just one fear-filled day among many. And the situation this week appears to be worsening.