The Martyrs of Iraq Ancient and Modern

It's been out for just over a year now, but I only just stumbled upon a book that reminds us, once again, of the horrific plight that has befallen so many Christians in Iraq in the last 15 years since the disastrous neoimperial war launched by the United States (the second of its kind in the region in just over a decade): Doves in Crimson Fields: Iraqi Christian Martyrs by Robert Ewan (Gracewing, 2017), 232pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

Christianity has been firmly established in Iraq for nearly two thousand years, but from the fourth century to the present day Christians in Iraq have faced periods of terrible persecution. This book brings together their stories, from the witness of martyrs sixteen hundred years ago, across the centuries, to our own time. In the twenty-first century Iraqi Christians have been confronted by relentless terrorist attack, by genocide and exile from their homeland. Alongside accounts of martyrdom and massacre under the Persian and Ottoman Empires and, in the twentieth century, the newly independent Kingdom of Iraq, Robert Ewan records the heart-rending stories of just some of the myriad of contemporary martyrs: Sister Cecilia Moshi Hanna, Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho, Father Ragheed Aziz Ganni and of the massacre at Sayidat al-Najat Church in Baghdad.