“The board has come under the increasing influence of al-Sadr – the party founded by the radical Muqtada al-Sadr. I can no longer work with these people who have come in with the new ministry. They have no knowledge of archaeology, no knowledge of antiquities; nothing,” he said speaking from Damascus to Art News.

Joseph said that George also commented on what he called the dramatic increase in a radical Moslem and anti-western environment. He said, “A lot of people have been sent to our institutions. They are only interested in Islamic sites, and not Iraqi’s earlier heritage.”

George is just one of the nearly 100,000 Assyrian Christians who are the original people of Iraq, Joseph said, the people of Nineveh and one of the last major Christian communities in the Middle East.

The Christian population of the Middle East was approximately 20 percent in the 1950’s, Joseph said, but now it has fallen to less than 2 percent.

Joseph said that George’s experience can be traced directly back to the Jan. 2006 elections.

Joseph commented that for the Iraqi people, “the elections were neither free nor fair. The President of Iraq said before the election that a large number of false ballots – up to three million – have been shipped across the border from Iran to alter the voting. Further, the U.N. designed Electoral System was carefully designed to give small, radical parties – i.e. Moslem- dominated parties, the benefit.”

Joseph said that meeting with the U.N. Director for Human Rights in Baghdad, he and others were given a clear message. He claimed the individual said, “My job is to protect the rights of the Moslems. Christians should leave.”

As a result, Joseph said that he and his colleagues immediately left the office. He added, “In true Middle East irony, the headquarters was bombed by the same radical Moslems.”

Commenting on the elections Joseph asserted, “Large amounts of people, in particular the Assyrian Christians and other minorities in the North, were denied the vote and the few who tried found closed voting centers and intimidation.”

As a result, Joseph claimed, “The result was an election that proceeded exactly as planned by the U.N. in consultation with the pro-Iran groups taking over the government, exactly as has happened with Hamas in the Palestinian territory where the close relationship between the U.N. Forces in the south of Lebanon and Hezbollah are legendary.”

Joseph further commented, “What is happening today in Iraq is not a failure of democracy, but a failure of the free world to stand up to totalitarian forces that are on the march with the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah and others.”

However, Joseph said that in his opinion there is still hope. He said that, “while the southern part of Iraq has for all practical purposes been annexed by Iran, the northern part of Iraq is going ‘gangbusters’”!

Joseph said that George and other Assyrian Christians who have fled the country will return under one condition – the establishment of an Assyrian Province “as promised by the Iraqi Government and guaranteed in the Constitution.”