Abducted Iraqi Christian Politician Pleads for Life in Video

After the success of the first Iraqi National Election, Christians expected the path to democracy to be brightened. However, the gloom of terrorist abductions are still threatening the minority in Iraq. On Thursday, a video was aired showing an Iraqi Christian politician of Swedish nationality who was abducted last month. He urges the king of Sweden and the Roman Catholic Pope to save his life.

Minas al-Yousifi said in the tape, "I appeal to King Carl XVI Gustaf, Queen Silvia, Pope John Paul II, the international union of Christian parties and the Association of Muslim Scholars...to work for my release and enable me to complete my national mission."

Yousifi is the Secretary General of Iraq's Christian Democratic Party. The 59-year-old politician was seized from the northern city of Mosul on 28 January. His captors are the extremist group called Martyr al-Isawy Brigades or "Iraqi Vengeance Batallion", whose name was on a black banner behind him in the video.

The captors have threatened to behead him. They want a $4 million ransom, a timetable for a pullout of U.S. troops and their replacement by U.N. personnel.

Yousifi was an asylum seeker in Sweden 20 years ago to escape persecution under Saddam Hussein. He returned to Iraq two years ago to re-establish the Christian Democratic Party. Sweden is home to about 60,000 Iraqis.

His family, and Swedish Christian Democrat politician Goran Hagglund, complained to Sweden's leaders and media on Wednesday for their indifference to Yousifi's fate. Currently, Yousifi’s son Avin hopes that the video will "put pressure on the foreign ministry" to seek his father's release.

Christians make up about 3 percent of Iraq's 27 million people. Several Christian churches have been attacked during the insurgency against the U.S.-backed government.