The 2019 edition of “Persecuted and Forgotten?” a biennial study of the persecution of Christians around the world, warns that Christianity is disappearing from towns and cities in the faith’s ancient homeland. Despite the defeat of ISIS, the impact of genocide has led to the haemorrhaging of great numbers of Christians from the region, says the report.

There were 1.5 million Christians in Iraq before 2003, but by mid-2019 that figure had fallen to well below 150,000. This represents a decline of more than ninety per cent within a single generation. In Syria, the size of the Christian population has fallen by two-thirds since the country’s civil war began in 2011, when Christians still represented a two million minority.

The report, which covers the period 2017-2019, notes that the international community has shown unprecedented concern about the persecution of the region’s Christians. But the report insists that “governments in the West and the UN failed to offer Christians in countries such as Iraq and Syria the emergency help they needed as genocide got underway.”

The full report can be found under this link: churchinneed.org