History is really going to hate on Bush for signing that SOFA agreement to leave. What was he thinking?
A Chaldean Catholic priest who was kidnapped and tortured by Islamic militants a decade ago in Iraq said Tuesday in Washington that while the American invasion of his country in 2003 was a “big mistake,” President Obama’s decision to withdraw American troops in 2011 was “a bigger mistake.”
After Obama ignored his generals’ recommendations and pulled the last U.S. troops out of Iraq, the president boasted that “we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq… This is an extraordinary achievement, nearly nine years in the making.”
But Fr. Douglas Bazi, a priest at the Mar Elias Catholic Church in the Chaldean Diocese of Erbil, pointed out that the U.S. troop withdrawal was a catastrophe for the indigenous Christian population of Iraq, which numbered 2 million before 2003.
“Now there are less than 200,000,” he said.
Fr. Bazi ministers to 400 Christian families who were forced to flee to Kurdistan to escape genocide by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which took advantage of the power vacuum left by the U.S. troop withdrawal to take over large sections of Iraq.
“If you were able to talk to President Obama today, what would you tell him?” CNSNews.com asked Fr. Bazi.
“I know you are going to le[ave] the White House, so let my people remember you in a good way. You give [the] order when the soldiers pull out. That was big mistake, that one. I don’t blame you, of course, because your soldiers, they were [sent] there, that was really also a big mistake. But the bigger mistake is when they pull out.
“So if you want to save the Christian [people in Iraq], please open the doors and help the Christian to stand there. Because all of my people there are just [saying] that America is just watching what’s happened to us.”
cnc news
