TERRIBLE PLIGHT

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLV, Issue 282, 2 November 1925, Page 9

TERRIBLE PLIGHT

CHRISTIAN REFUGEES. MAJORITY WITHOUT FOOD. (By Electric Telegraph—Copyright.) Received November 2, 9.35 a.m. LONDON, Nov. 1. The Times’s Mosul correspondent, describing tho plight of between 2000 and 3000 Christians who escaped from the Turkish deportations along tho Brussels line and are now refuging in Bersine and Zakho, says: “The majority are foodless. Many have only one garment for protection from the weather, which is wet and very cold. The Irak Government is doing its best to feed them, aided by the Royal Air Force and other Mosul units, who are sending money and clothing, but unless substantial European help is forthcoming the refugees must gradually die off. At present they are living in rude, temporary booths and army tents. They utterly lack possessions of any sort and have no bedding. “Christians were eating acorns when I saw them, and many were ill. They related terrible stories of the Turks’ atrocious, callous and barbarous brutality. Old men and women and toddling babes were killed because they did not march fast, enough. Most of the deportees were reported to be distributed among the Kurdish chiefs, who gave receipts for them, and many died of starvation.”—Times.