Wednesday, November 17, 2010  Iraqi Christians and immigration
When I met Maryam last spring, she was desperate. "Please help
me get out of here," she pleaded. She was continually harassed,
she told me, by her new neighbours, rural Shia Muslims who had
come to Karradeh from the south after the 2003 U.S.-led
invasion. "They tell me I’m a bad woman, and that I will go to
hell." But as Maryam tearfully blurted out her story of living
alone as a virtual shut-in, terrorized by local militias and
longing to join family members abroad, she already seemed to be
in hell.  The above is from Hadani Ditmars' "The suffering of
Iraq's Christians" (Globe and Mail). Ditmars explains Maryam had
left Iraq for Syria due to the violence but money issues ("her
meagre United Nations stipend") forced her to return to Baghdad
where she found the violence had neither vanished nor merely
diminished. AP reports that Berlin's Interior Minister Ehrhart
Koerting issued a call today for Germany to provide refuge to
2,500 Iraqi Christians.