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Christians in Iraq

One of the problems, as I saw, is that the writ for the Baghdad Government does not seem to apply in northern Iraq. It was only when I was in the Nineveh plains that I saw that many of the checkpoints were held not by Christians, who seem to have no weaponry at all, or have very little, and not by the Iraqi army—I never saw any of the Iraqi army—but by the peshmerga and the Kurds. In fact, the Iraqi Prime Minister has said publicly that he suspects that Kurdish militias were involved in some of the killings in Mosul. I do not know whether that is right, but clearly there is a state of chaos in Mosul and no proper control. The Christians there feel that they are utterly unprotected, which is why they are fleeing Mosul and going to their own villages in the Nineveh plains.