ISIS severed territory it held from the outside world, but word got out about the militant group's brutality and its nihilistic campaign to destroy historic sites and monuments. One was the monastery of St. Elijah outside Mosul, which stood for 1,400 years and was the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq.
It quickly became clear to Lalo that ISIS intended to eradicate Iraq's indigenous Christian community and all evidence of its 2,000-year civilization. He heard the word "genocide" being used to describe his people just as it had been for the Yazidis.
At one time, nearly 5 million Assyrian Christians lived in Iraq as a healthy minority, but their numbers have dwindled through the decades. They fled to faraway places such as the United States, Europe and Australia, and many more who have been displaced by ISIS are hoping to do the same.
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