Execution or exodus, Iraqi Christians face grim choice

For Iraqi Christian Fadi and his young family it is a lonely wait to see whether they will be executed soon.

Their Christian neighbours and friends have already fled the city of Mosul in Iraq's north, which last month fell into the hands of Sunni jihadists led by the Islamic State group, which espouses an extreme form of Islam.

Along with the rest of the city's estimated 25,000 Christians who had not already fled years of kidnappings, bombings and shootings, Sunni militants gave 36-year-old Fadi, his wife and son until Saturday to comply with a brutal ultimatum: convert to Islam, pay an unspecified tax, leave the city or die.

"I'm staying. I already feel dead," Fadi, a teacher, told AFP by telephone moments before the deadline ran out.

"Only my soul remains, and if they want to take that I don't have a problem," he added, giving only his first name.

On Friday, Mosul's mosques called through loudspeakers for Christians to leave, after centuries of being part of the once cosmopolitan city's social fabric.

Fadi said he could not afford to flee and argued that the prospects for those who did were hardly better.

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