Salahadin, Erbil – Reports from Mosul indicate that hundreds of Christian families are fleeing the city after a series of terrorist attacks directed at them. The local government of Mosul has never, not even once, not even for a little bit failed to disappoint their constituents.

One of my earliest memories of interacting with Christians involves going to our Christian neighbors’ houses on what I later would learn was Easter to get colored eggs. A group of us, Muslim boys would get together and go to Christian houses, every year in a trick-or-treat (minus the costumes) style of collecting candy and colored eggs. That was before I even went to school. At school, I had a number of Christian friends, we had a class called, “Islamic Education” and Christians were asked to leave the classroom for that period, that was the “secular” Saddam’s way of saying that Christians don’t have to learn about Islam if they choose not to, but I don’t really remember it to be a choice, I think they had to leave. I am speaking from memory and not as an expert on education curriculum.

In 1991 Iraqi Kurdistan was freed from Saddam’s regime and in the almost two decades that followed, the Christians of this region have thrived politically, culturally and economically. Let me back this up. Kurdish law dictates that amongst the 11 quota seats of the 111-member parliament, 6 must be filled by Christians, one of which is for Armenians. The proposed constitution of the Kurdistan region lists all of the Christian communities of the region as major components of the Kurdistani society.

The Syriac language whose immediate parent language is Aramaic is taught in Kurdistan’s public schools, students don’t merely take one language class in their mother tongue, the whole curriculum is in Syriac. This system applies to all Christian students for all pre-collegial levels of education. TV and radio stations, magazines and newspapers as well as tens of Chaldo-Assyrian cultural centers criss-cross this region.

Nearly all Christian churches have been renovated and tens of new ones have been built, some of the churches in Kurdistan and in the immediate disputed territories date back to the 7th century AD! According to AINA, 66 churches have been bombed in Iraq since the start of combat operations in 2003, far more than 66 churches have been built in the Kurdistan Region since 2003! Zero have been bombed by the terrorists.

The Christian villages that were demolished by the former regime have all now been rebuilt, thousands of housing units have been built by the KRG for Christian villagers across the Kurdistan region. Additionally, large sums of money have been invested by the KRG in Christian areas in the disputed areas of the Nineveh plains.

While Christians are targeted in the rest of Iraq simply for being Christian, the Kurdistan region has opened its arms for thousands of Christian families who now call Kurdistan home. Not only are they welcomed here and enjoy all the rights as the native Kurdistanis, they are also given financial assistance, in the form of monthly stipends, thanks to the KRG-established Christian Affairs Committee headed by Sarkis Aghajan.

Mr. Aghajan is an Assyrian Kurdistani whose contributions to the enhancement of Christians’ living standards in Iraqi Kurdistan have earned him international recognition, including having been knighted by the sitting pope with the award of knight commander in the order of St. Gregory the Great (rarely given to non-Catholics). Once KRGs finance minister, Sarkis, 48 is now retired and last week at his residence in Ainkawa, he told me that he wants to write his memoirs and complete his mission, hoping that ultimately, other governments in the Middle East would look after their Christian minorities.

Alas, so little of this is reported. On the contrary, last fall, Human Rights Watch released a report on the minorities of the Nineveh plains titled, “On Vulnerable Ground” where they shamelessly ignored the Christians’ golden era under the KRG.

KRG officials are not angels, they are politicians, they do not do it because of the “black eyes” of Christians, they do it for votes and popularity, but the end result is that a generation of Christians are now fluent in their mother tongue, that their villages are built, that their political rights are protected, that their culture is thriving and that their golden age in modern Iraq is now, here in Kurdistan.

Just last week, the region’s President, Mr. Massoud Barzani ordered Kurdish universities to accept 2000 Christian college students from Mosul to continue their education here in Kurdistan. Atheel al-Nujaifi, Mosul’s governor was unable to even comment on the Presidents move, mainly because he knows that he cannot protect his Christian citizens, because in Mosul, the terrorist continue to be active and their motto continues to be, “be a Sunni Arab or be dead.”