St Matthew Monastery, a Syriac Orthodox monastery overlooking the Nineveh Plains towns of Bashiqa and Bartella, in between the Kurdistan Region and Iraq. Christians in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East are being wiped out on an unprecedented scale due to ethnic cleansing campaigns by the likes of the so-called Islamic State (IS), the Gatestone Institute reports on its website.

It said the IS has killed over 1,130 Christians and destroyed 125 of their churches in recent times, with many of the murders apparently going unreported in Western mainstream media.

Eighty-one percentage of Iraq’s Christians have now disappeared from the war-torn country, according to a new report from the Iraqi Human Rights Society.

The society described the status quo as a “slow genocide” with minorities including Christians, Yazidis and Shabaks facing alarming levels of religious and ethnic persecution.

The Gatestone Institute quoted French Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia as likening the situation to the Holocaust as he appealed to Europe and other Western countries to defend non-Muslims in the region.