MOSUL, Iraq—On Nov. 13, gunmen killed an Armenian teenager, Rami Katchik, in a drive-by shooting outside his family home on Friday in the restive northern Iraqi city of Mosul, reported AFP.
“Unidentified gunmen opened fire from a speeding black car on the adolescent before fleeing the scene in Tahrir,” a police officer said. Tahrir is a Christian neighborhood in eastern Mosul.
A neighbor said Katchik, 16, a member of the minority Armenian community, had been hosing down the entrance to his family home when the shooting occurred.
“His father had just gone into the house to get a shovel and ran out when he heard the gunshots and saw three men in the car,” said the neighbor Girgis Paulos.
It was unclear if he had been targeted because of his faith.
But a local priest, Hazem Girgis, described the killing as part of “crimes aimed at uprooting Christians and forcing them to flee.”
Thousands of Christians fled Mosul last year because of violence that claimed the lives of 40 people from the community.
HRW report: Christians face danger in Iraq
On Nov. 10, Human Rights Watch released a 51-page report calling on the central government in Baghdad to protect minorities at the local, provincial, and national levels, and to investigate killings and displacement of Assyrian Christians and deadly attacks against other minorities. To read the report, visit http://www.hrw.org/en/node/86357.
Around 800,000 Christians lived in Iraq at the time of the invasion, but their number has since shrunk by around a third or more as members of the minority community have fled the country, according to Christian leaders.
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