Christian Assyrians/Chaldeans/Syriacs were given four options: convert to Islam, flee, die or pay extortion money (so called jizye, a religious tax).
That soldier staring into the red fog that hung in the air seemed so poorly prepared for battle that I could not help but wonder why he, among the thousands of Iraqi soldiers who simply tore off their uniforms and fled, died defending Saddam Hussein.
Nor does he include one of the best essays in the modern continental tradition on friendship, death and suicide, "The Experience of Death" (1938) by Paul-Louis Landsberg, a German Jewish Catholic who refused a chance to flee and died in a Nazi camp.
One fleeing woman died of a heart attack.
Some fled, some died, and many were sold into slavery or forced to "marry" fighters.
Protestant business leaders, who had been the country's best entrepreneurs, either fled or died.
Hirschfeld – gay, Jewish, socialist, everything the Nazis despised – fled, and died in France two years later.
Hidden deep in woods a few miles west of Nazareth, Bethlehem HaGalilit is without any visible Christian presence: no churches are to be seen and its old stone homes are occupied by Jews, mainly descendants of those who fled or died in the Holocaust.
Most health professionals had fled or died during the fighting.
