Paul KeenanChristians in post-ISIS Iraq face new challenges, writes Paul Keenan
As Iraqi forces continue to make gains against so-called Islamic State (ISIS) in and around the city of Mosul, regular dispatches from behind the line of advance bring a growing picture of the intense suffering of Christians, whether they be refugees who fled empty-handed ahead of the militants’ rampage in 2014, or those unfortunates constrained to stay and fall prey to the depredations meted out by puritanical fanatics. Some of these latter experiences are related on preceding pages in this week’s paper.
Coverage of the ‘post-ISIS’ era is brought on a tide of rising positivity as individuals and communities look towards rebuilding lives and communities in villages stolen from them over the past two years. For Christians, however, deliverance has brought an entirely new set of concerns as the landscape is cleared in the name of a free Iraq.
Combining to illustrate all last week were dual reports on the return of civilians and clergy to the liberated town of Bartella (on the outskirts of Mosul), and an intervention on the part of Loay Mikhael, a Christian representative now advocating on behalf of displaced Christians.
Evidence
Early in the week, media outlets offered evidence of the destructive fanaticism that is the driving force of ISIS. Embedded journalists peered on the shattered remains of the Church of St George in Bartella as its congregation took the first tentative steps through its portals since militants were ousted. What they found there were clear signs of an orgy of destruction visited upon all elements of Christianity within the building’s precincts.
Marian statues lay toppled and beheaded, frescoes were defaced with ISIS symbols and Bibles were shorn of their pages and burned, the fires leaving the interior blackened and ruined. (As a cruel extra, soldiers entering Bartella have found undamaged Bibles elsewhere rigged to booby traps for unwary Christians.)
As with other sites newly freed, despair at the extent of vandalism has been tempered by a defiance born of a community’s hunger to strike back at the enemy in the one way they can, by rebuilding.
In this the residents of Bartella will surely prove their mettle. On-the-ground reports indicate that bad as the damage is to the Church of St George, that in the wider village is far worse. Where buildings have not been levelled by fighting, they have been extensively damaged and undermined by tunnels running hither and thither to better facilitate ISIS defences. Bartella’s re-birth will be a long one.
But bricks and mortar are quickly becoming something of a secondary concern as the vacuum left in the wake of ISIS threatens to fill with the dangerous jockeying of other agendas at the expense of Christians.
Simultaneous to the Bartella coverage, The Christian Post reported on the words of Loay Mikhael, head of the foreign relations committee of the Chaldean Syriac Assyrian Popular Council and deputy chairman of the Soraya Charity Organisation in Nineveh. In short, Mikhael offered his own worrying dispatch of a recent meeting between representatives of the Iraqi forces together with those of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) and other interest groups to argue over future control of areas around Mosul and further afield across the Nineveh Plains.
Christians were not invited to this meeting and thus had no voice to raise against arguments and proposals in relation to their place within the future Iraq or Kurdish-controlled territory. (It is to be noted that while Kurdish authorities proclaim that Christians are safe in area controlled by the KRG, Christians quickly point out that in 2014, communities were abandoned to their fate by Kurdish forces fleeing the ISIS advance.)
“Christians don’t know what will happen as far as who will rule the area,” Mikhael said. “So, we have been asking similar questions about what will be the post-ISIS era and nobody has given us any answer to that. Now, central government and KRG are having a conflict between themselves and each of them is claiming this is their area.”
Mikhael points to the not unnatural concerns of Christians that the persecution of ISIS may yet be replaced with a new form with the same aim of driving them from their ancestral homes.
Such concerns were then echoed by Charmaine Hedding, a specialist in humanitarian affairs who is linked with the Shai Fund, a non-profit organisation currently working with refugees from the Iraq conflict.
Competition
In her own summation of current fears among Christians hoping to return home, she pointed not only to the Iraqi government in competition with the Kurds, but to various Shia factions (backed by Iran) and to Turkey, the latter drawn in by its determination to thwart any vision of a Kurdish homeland on its doorstep. In a country beset by tribal loyalties, all sides are massing their own militias to defend territory gained and claimed.
“Iraq’s Christians are caught in the crossfire of a dangerous power struggle,” Hedding explained. “Their villages and towns are located in disputed territories.”
One Kurdish journalist writing on the unfolding situation said that “The end of the Mosul battle is the beginning of the battle for Iraq”.
In the face of such a nightmare scenario, can Christians truly endure in Iraq? What Christian militias exist have been ferocious in the fight to drive back ISIS forces, but this has been in collaboration with the greater forces of the Kurds and Iraqi army, groupings they cannot be expected to hold off if the fight does indeed turn inwards.
Meanwhile, one harsh fact to be faced is that the Christian community as its stands today across the whole of Iraq is that of a minority seriously denuded since the American invasion of 2003; a population that once stood at 1.5million is estimated to be no more than 200,000 today. In the current climate, what hope is there of a mass return?
Hopes of a safe haven for Christians on the Nineveh Plains have already foundered due to disputes among legislators in Baghdad reluctant to give a commitment to autonomous Christian rule.
On the international front, meanwhile, a resolution adopted by the European Parliament in late October for the protection of Christians and Yazidis seems a most blunt weapon when set against the multiple local challenges. And with the incoming US administration predicted to be far more isolationist, there is little hope of substantial assistance from that quarter.
As they begin Christmas celebrations amid the ruins of their ‘liberated’ churches, Iraq’s Christians still pray for deliverance.