BRUSSELS (AFP) — Nearly 4,000 people demonstrated in Brussels on Saturday against violence perpetrated against Iraqi Christians in the strife-torn country, according to police and organisers.
Protestors, mainly Iraqi Christians, came from Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland to participate in the march through the heart of Brussels' EU quarter, organisers said.
The demonstration was aimed at drawing attention to attacks on Christians in Iraq, said Fikri Aygur, vice chairman of the European Syriac Union, organisers of the march.
"We wanted to call on the US, the EU and the UN to find a solution for the Christians," he told AFP.
The march was supposed to start in front of the US embassy in Brussels, but police did not allow it because of the large numbers, Aygur said.
Iraq's Christians, with the Chaldean sect the largest community, were said to total as many as 800,000 before the US-led invasion in 2003 but the number is now thought to be half that figure.
Widespread persecution including the bombing of churches and the murder of priests has forced hundreds of thousands to flee, mostly to neighbouring countries or to Kurdish northern Iraq.
In February the Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Mosul, Paulos Faraj Rahho, was kidnapped. His corpse was found the following month.
Earlier this month, gunmen shot dead Assyrian Orthodox priest Youssef Adel near his house in the centre of the Iraqi capital as he left home.
On Friday in Luxembourg, the European Union's Slovenian presidency rejected a German proposal to offer preferential asylum treatment to Iraqi Christians.
German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble wanted to persuade other EU countries to offer asylum to thousands of Iraq's minority Christians because of violence against them in majority-Muslim Iraq.
His plan was initially mooted by Germany's Catholic and Protestant churches who are powerful allies of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's party
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