The Plight of Christians in Iraq

Christian fathers told to convert to Islam or watch their children lose their heads.

Christians fleeing their communities shot, their dead bodies lined up on the ground, then rolled over by a bulldozer as their loved ones watch.

These are just some of the stories Canon Andrew White and Dr. Sarah Ahmed shared at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Monday.

Ahmed is a Muslim woman who's organizing aid for Christian and other religious minorities fleeing for their lives in northern Iraq through the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East.

Canon White is president of the foundation. He's lived in Baghdad for 15 years serving as vicar of the only Anglican church in Iraq, and as chaplain to the U.S. Embassy.

"Now when I want to see my people I go to Chicago," he says in his British accent, referring to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians who have fled and are fleeing barbarian ISIS terrorists.

White recalled a recent phone call from one of his friends in northern Iraq. The man was hysterical. He told White ISIS fighters came to his house. They told him if he didn't recite the words to convert to Islam they would behead his children immediately.

He converted to save his children, and asked Canon White through sobs, "I'm a Christian, I live for Yeshua, does Yeshua still love me?"

When Dr. Ahmed visits Christians in refugee camps she asks what the ISIS fighters look like. They tell her they have long beards, intense eyes, and no hearts.

"I have no idea how the country (Iraq) will heal or how we will come out after this," she says.

Now the foundation is doing something unheard of. Ahmed and others are working to buy Iraqi Christian girls that ISIS has captured and is now selling as sex slaves.

"So many girls are being raped and sold everyday," she says, "and nobody is doing anything about it."

Their goal is to buy the women and reunite them with their families, but Ahmed says it's difficult because few people will talk.

How did this happen? Both White and Ahmed blame, in part, the U.S. and its allies for pulling out of Iraq before Iraq was ready. White also says Sunni Muslims were treated so poorly by Iraq's government he's not surprised so many turned to terrorism.

And as long as the religion of Islam is tied to the government of Iraq, Ahmed says her country will never enjoy a thriving pluralistic society.