U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has called for Iranian-backed militias, who helped defeat the Islamic State (IS) in Mosul, Iraq and have set up checkpoints in Iraqi villages once mostly populated by Christians over three years ago, to leave the country, the Christian Post website reports today (October 23, 2017).
Tillerson stressed yesterday now that the Islamic State has been pushed out of its stronghold in Mosul and the surrounding Nineveh Plains, "all foreign fighters need to go home."
Tillerson's comment comes as representatives of the Christian community in Iraq and human rights activists have voiced concern about how Iranian presence in towns once populated by Christians before the IS displaced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in the Nineveh region in 2014 is intimidating Christians and preventing them from returning to their rightful homes.
Nina Shea, a human rights lawyer who serves as director of Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom, told the Christian Post last month that the U.S. government should not take lightly the fact that "Iran is aggressively establishing schools and mosques and libraries and other structures [in Iraq]within the main Christian towns."
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