New Iraqi cardinal calls for release of Saddam aide (Tareq Aziz)

[Barrett808]

Source: Reuters

New Iraqi cardinal calls for release of Saddam aide
By Mussab Al-Khairalla

BAGHDAD, Dec 23 (Reuters) - The spiritual leader of Iraq's Catholics, elevated to the rank of cardinal last month, called on U.S. forces to free Saddam Hussein's ailing former deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz if there was no evidence against him.

Aziz is a Chaldean Christian, Iraq's biggest Christian group, and his presence in Saddam's government was often held up as evidence of the former Iraqi leader's religious tolerance.

In an interview with Reuters on the eve of Christmas, Emmanuel III Delly, the Chaldean patriarch of Baghdad, also called for religious freedom in Muslim Iraq, where many Christians have been kidnapped, killed or forced to flee.

"We have no freedom of religion in Iraq but hopefully that will become the case one day because the Lord created us free and everyone should have freedom of religion," he said.

Read more: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/COL341969.htm

[msongs]

1. well, cardinal, what goes around comes around in regard to "freedom of religion" so get over it nt

[regnaD kciN]

2. How's that again...?

Since when did Iraq's Chaldean Christians ever deny their fellow countrymen freedom of religion? Or is this just another "Christians are eeeeeeeevil" post? :eyes:

[nealmhughes]

3. To suggest that they would or could have is like saying that Mizrahi Jews denied freedom of religion

to Christians and Moslems in Alexandria, simply ludicrous. Evidently the poster has not a whit of information about minority religious status in Iraq, i.e., that the Republic was a secular republic -- albeit a most ghastly one -- where the ideas of the Baath Party -- founded by a Christian in Lebanon, by the way, and made up of every nominal spectrum of Iraqi relious society -- was a Pan-Arab philosophy, not a religious philosophy at all. The fact that Saddam was a member of a Sunni tribe, the al Tikiritis, and the resultant nepotism, plus a genuine mistrust of Iranian-Shia influence made the Sunnis from Tikrit the de facto dominant (nominal) religious sect in power.