Comrade Sinan in Jadaliyya

"While Iraqi Christians are not the only targets of this sectarian violence (Sabaeans and Yazidis amongst the non-Muslims, for example) and of course hundreds of thousands of Sunnis and Shi`is have also been the victims of violence and have had their mosques and shrines attacked, the plight of Christians and other non-Muslims always receives disproportionate attention in the west. Genuine concern for the plight of others notwithstanding, the tradition of official “concern” for minorities in the Middle East, especially Christians, has been used as a pretext for intervention and a tool to gain geopolitical influence and power. On the popular level it reinforces orientalist stereotypes of the Islamic world and its societies as ultimately inhospitable and naturally intolerant of others, and consequently the colonial fantasy of the west as an automatic guardian of threatened minorities over “there.”
Christian communities in Iraq are among the oldest in the world and trace their presence back to the early centuries of Christianity. Tracing that history is beyond the scope and the space of this essay, but it wouldn’t be too exorbitant to say that, notwithstanding occasional tensions and frictions, on the whole, the lot of Christians in Iraq in pre-modern times belies any narratives of consistent and transhistorical oppression by Muslims or Muslim rulers. Moreover, the Chaldean Church, whose followers are the largest in numbers among Iraqi Christians, flourished under the `Abbasids (750-1258). Throughout the pre-modern period there was discrimination and certain privileges were not fully accorded minorities, including Christians, but suffice it to say that the presence and welfare of Christians in Iraq was never threatened en masse until recent years."