{"id":15926,"date":"2012-02-15T11:52:49","date_gmt":"2012-02-15T14:52:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/?p=15926"},"modified":"2012-02-15T11:52:53","modified_gmt":"2012-02-15T14:52:53","slug":"iraq-invasion-decimated-iraqi-christian-population","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/15\/iraq-invasion-decimated-iraqi-christian-population\/","title":{"rendered":"Iraq Invasion Decimated Iraqi Christian Population"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the archbishop of the military, has said one of the unintended <a href=\"http:\/\/www.catholicnewsagency.com\/news\/military-archbishop-u.s.-invasion-led-to-fewer-iraqi-christians\/\">consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq<\/a> was the resulting annihilation of the already-minority Christian community:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>You can say in a certain sense that the invasion of Iraq did provoke this tremendous diminution of the Christian population in <!--more-->that country. And what the future holds, that still remains to be seen,\u201d the archbishop for the armed forces told CNA during his visit to Rome on Jan. 16&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Aid agencies estimate that over the course of eight years, the Catholic population of Iraq fell from over 800,000, to less than 150,000 now&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Likewise, while Christians have always been an extremely small minority in Afghanistan, since the invasion there are now <a href=\"http:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/2012\/01\/02\/us-army-engages-afghans-on-culture-religion\/\">no public Christian churches<\/a>\u00a0remaining.<\/p>\n<p>In both cases, the small <a href=\"http:\/\/www.calcatholic.com\/news\/newsArticle.aspx?id=389f9447-4fa8-481d-9510-31df40f940ae\">Christian populations have largely fled<\/a> after the US-supported governments failed to provide them the physical protection they felt they needed.<\/p>\n<p>US military chaplains continue to try to <a href=\"http:\/\/paraglideonline.net\/020212_news3.html\">nurture a relationship<\/a> with a few <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mechlocal.com\/index.php\/news\/article\/friendship_brings_iraqi_pastor_to_local_church\/6952\/\">remaining Christian pastors<\/a> from Iraq.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the archbishop of the military, has said one of the unintended consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the resulting annihilation of the already-minority Christian community: You can say in a certain sense that the invasion of Iraq did provoke this tremendous diminution of the Christian population in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[58,5284,96,52,2,10,171,583],"class_list":["post-15926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government-and-religion","tag-afghanistan","tag-chaplain","tag-christian","tag-iraq","tag-military","tag-religion","tag-religious-freedom","tag-timothy-broglio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15926\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}