“As we express our solidarity with the people of Iraq, and convey our condolences to the families of the victims, we are very concerned about the new escalation of violence against Christians in Mosul,” said Olav Fykse Tveit, general secretary of the World Council of Churches, on May 12.
Thousands of Christians protested in northern Iraq on May 3 about the previous day’s bomb attacks on the buses, which were carrying students and workers. It is believed the explosions wounded around 200 people.
A banner at the demonstration read, “We are not a minority, we are an authentic part of the Iraqi people,” the Agence France-Presse news agency reported. “We ask the prime minister (Nuri al-Maliki) to stop the tragedy of the Christians.”
The students on the buses came from the mainly Christian town of Hamdaniya, 40 kilometers east of Mosul.
“All of them were Christian students. They go in buses like that to Mosul’s university after the troubled times, when Christians were targeted in the past,” aljazeera.net quoted Nissan Karoumi, the mayor of Hamdaniya, as saying.
