The Iraqi government has eventually made Christmas Day, December 25, an official nationwide holiday, to mark the ‘occasion of the birth of Jesus Christ’.
The announcement was made Tuesday, after the Iraqi Cabinet approved an amendment to its national holiday’s law which creates a new official one ‘on the occasion of the birth of Jesus Christ‘. A tweet on Iraq’s official government handle reads;
“The @IraqiGovt announces Christmas Day to be an official holiday across Iraq. Happy Christmas to our Christian citizens, all Iraqis and to all who are celebrating around the world,” the Iraqi government wrote on Twitter.
‘We extend our warmest wishes to Christians in Iraq and around the world for a very happy and peaceful Christmas,’ it added.
Iraq is a 95 per cent Muslim country – 66 per cent are Shia and 29 per cent Sunni. There are others believed to be around 300,000 Christians remaining in the country, the vast majority of whom are Aramaic-speaking ethnic Assyrians. There are also a smaller communities of Armenians, Kurds, Arabs and Iraqi Turkmens.
Iraq used to be Babylon as it is in the Holy Bible. Later named Mesopotamia, a land of 2 rivers – ‘Tigris and Euphrates’ under a colonial government at that time.