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The vast majority of Christians in Iraq are indigenous Assyrians who descend from ancient Assyria, and are considered to be one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world. They primarily adhere to the Syriac Christian tradition and rites and speak Northeastern Neo-Aramaic dialects , although Turoyo is also present on a smaller ...
According to the most recent government statistics, 97% of the population of Iraq was Muslim in 2010 (60% Shia and 40% Sunni); the constitution states that Islam is the official religion of the country. [1] In 2023, Iraq was scored 1 out of 4 for religious freedom. [2] In the same year, it was ranked as the 18th worst place in the world to be a ...
They were 8% or 1.4 million in a population of 16.3 million in 1987 and 1.5 million in 2003 of 26 million. Emigration has been high since the 1970s. In 2002, the Christian population in Iraq numbered 1.2–2.1 million. There is also a significant population of Armenian Christians in Iraq who had fled Turkey during the Armenian genocide.
Christianity, which originated in the Middle East during the 1st century AD, [26] is a significant minority religion within the region, characterized by the diversity of its beliefs and traditions, compared to Christianity in other parts of the Old World. Today, Christians make up approximately 5% of the Middle Eastern population, down from 13% ...
Christians are believed to have lived in Iraq since the first century AD. In 2003, Iraq counted one million Christians according to The New York Times [13] on a population of 26 million; [14] the estimate of Syriac Catholic officials was then 2½ million Christians. [4] Between 2003 and 2007, 40% of the refugees fleeing Iraq were Christian.
There has not been a census in Iraq since 2010, and there is no exact number of Christians in the country. Local leaders suggest that there were 150,000 Christians in 2022; [2] however, other estimates suggested that there were 295,000 Catholics. [1] All figures suggest that Catholics make up less than 1% of the country's population.
Christians remain the most persecuted religious group in the Middle East, and Christians in Iraq are “close to extinction”. [ 8 ] [ 9 ] [ 10 ] According to estimates by the US State Department , the number of Christians in Iraq has fallen from 1.2 million 2011 to 120,000 in 2024, and the number in Syria from 1.5 million to 300,000, falls ...
An Assyrian Christian church in Alqosh. A number of Christian militias in Iraq and Syria have been formed since the start of the Syrian Civil War and in the 2013-2017 War.The militias are composed of fighters mainly from the Assyrian but also include Arab and Armenian Christian communities in Syria, and Assyrians in Iraq have formed militias in the north to protect Assyrian communities, towns ...