Iraqi Christians say there’s no going home after rise of Islamic State
Maan George Hanna, an Iraqi Christian refugee at a church shelter in
Jordan. Credit: Kim Pozniak/CRS.
By Kevin J. Jones
Amman, Jordan, Jan 7, 2015 / 04:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Christians
lived in Iraq for nearly two thousand years, but the violent rise of
the Islamic State has convinced many Christian refugees they must
forever leave their homeland.
“No, we will never go back,” Taif Hanna, an engineer from Mosul, told
reporters in Amman Oct. 28.
“ISIS tried to kill us,” he said. The militant group offered three
choices: conversion to Islam, payment of an extortionate tax, or
death.
“So we all fled Iraq,” Taif said.
The Islamic State, called Daesh by its Arabic-speaking opponents,
surged across Iraq in 2014. In June it captured Mosul, a historic
center of Iraqi Christianity on the Tigris River, near where the
ancient city of Nineveh once stood.
Taif Hanna is one of about 47 Iraqi Christians who have taken shelter
at a converted building on the grounds of Sacred Heart of Jesus
Catholic Church in Naour, a district on the west side of Amman.
The shelter is lined with partitions eight feet tall to create small
rooms. Near the entrance, a whiteboard bears an inscription, written
in Arabic: “Blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness’
sake.”
Next to the whiteboard are posters of two photos. One photo shows a
statue of the Virgin Mary’s face. The cheeks beneath her eyes are
stained, as if she has been crying blood.
It is captioned, “Your tears in every place are a purification, a
bible of love, compassion and light.”
The other picture shows a large cross in silhouette. Behind the cross
is a bright sunrise – or a sunset.
Taif’s 52-year-old father, Maan George Hanna, also does not think he
will return home.
“I will leave all my history there. Because of the terrorism,” he
lamented. “We have no trust in the government or anything. Never,
forever.”
Hanna said his grandfather was “the servant of the oldest church in Mosul.”
The church was started in 360, he said. “More than 1,600 years ago.”
“We left all of that. We left all our history. We don’t want to go
back. We are wanting peace.”
Hanna, his wife and children are all engineers from Mosul, where his
father taught English. As a student, Hanna studied in Romania, Italy,
and Spain. A polyglot, he speaks all three countries’ languages, in
addition to English and Arabic.
Hanna and his family fled Mosul early on June 10, when they learned
that “terrorists” were crossing the Tigris only 10 to 15 minutes away
from their home.
“We left with these clothes,” Hanna said, pulling at his own shirt.
“We left our home, we left our car, we left all the memories of the
children. My own home.”
They escaped to Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, and joined 30
other displaced persons in a small apartment. They didn’t have enough
money for tickets out of the country.
Catholic groups such as Caritas Jordan helped fund Hanna and some of
his family to travel to Jordan in mid-September.
However, his father, his mother, his brother and his family could not
come because they didn’t have their passports.
“My father and mother are old, more than 75 years. They haven’t had to
think about travel or leaving their house.”
As of late October, Hanna’s family in Iraq was seeking help from the
French embassy.
“We don’t know the future. We are hoping now for the future of our
children, only. Not for us.”
Hanna said his family had previously been forced to leave their homes
several times in 2008 and 2009 due to fears of violence. Iraqi
Christians had suffered problems for decades.
The beginning of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980 marked a turning point for
the worse, he said.
“We were as prisoners in our own country,” he said of Iraqis.
“Especially the Christians.”
He recounted that when one of his sons was in school, his Muslim
classmates would cite his father’s middle name George – a Christian
name – and laugh derisively that it was not a Muslim name.
“Will we go back? No,” Hanna said.
There were 1.6 to 1.8 million Christians in Iraq before the 2005
execution of Saddam Hussein. Now there are only an estimated 400,000
to 450,000.
Another of the Iraqi Christians in Jordan is Maitham Najib, a
36-year-old mechanic from Bakhdida, a largely Christian city 20 miles
from Mosul which Islamic State seized on Aug. 7.
Najib was staying at a shelter at St. Ephriam Syriac Orthodox Church
in the Amman area.
“Until now, we didn’t suffer as Jesus Christ,” he said. “This is
nothing compared to what he did for us, to suffer for us.”
Najib, his wife, and his three children now live in cramped conditions
at with dozens of other refugees at the church shelter, converted with
the help of Catholic Relief Services. The shelter’s television played
the U.S. show NCIS, subtitled in Arabic, as Najib’s children played
the card game Uno at a table outside.
Najib’s father, his mother, and two sisters are still in Baghdad. But
returning to Iraq is not an option for him.
“We don’t want to.”
Even before the rise of Islamic State, he was a victim of the violence
which followed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
Najib was living in Baghdad in 2005, when he was kidnapped and held
for eight days by unknown attackers.
They released him, but robbed him and stabbed him at least ten times.
He still has the scars.
Najib is pessimistic
“We are thankful for the Jordanian government and for Caritas, what
they are doing for us … but the situation is not good. They can’t give
you everything.”
“It’s done for us, at this age,” he said. “We want to guarantee our
children’s future: education, everything, for them. Especially for
them.”
The pastor of Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church, a Latin Rite
church in Amman, reflected on the refugees’ situation.
“They are suffering because they are Christians,” said Father Rifat
Bader, who is also the general director of the Catholic Center for
Studies and Media.
“Faith is the main treasure that we have. When you see that these
people, these families, found a way to escape without money, without
gold, without their passport even, this means that the faith is more
important than money, than gold, than everything.”
“Really they are teachers,” the priest said of the refugees.
“They are normal people, very kind people, people full of pride
because they kept their faith. They could become (Muslims), in one
moment, but they refused.” This was not “because they hate all Muslims
or Islam,” he explained, but rather “they want to keep their faith
because it is part of their identity.”
“They wanted to stay firm in their faith. It is very important, and it
is a great lesson for all of us.”
In Jordan, Fr. Bader said, the refugees “feel the freedom, they feel a
part of the Church, when they read the gospel or the readings in the
Mass.”
“Their accent is full of sadness, but also full of hope.”
He particularly remembered a Christian girl from Mosul who said the
Mass reading after her arrival.
“Who separates us from the love of Christ?” was the reading, from Romans 8.
“Not the death, nor persecution, nor Daesh is separating us,” Fr. Bader added.
He suggested that what the refugees did in keeping their faith is “a
heroic part of the history of the Church.”
“People will be proud that these Christians left their country, but
they kept their faith. This is greatness for the future.”
The priest acknowledged that the Christian refugees do not want to
return to Iraq.
“To us, it is very sad to hear this,” he said.
While Palestinian refugees still dream of returning home 60 years
after being displaced by Israel, he said, “the Iraqi man and woman
feels sadness because something died in his heart. He doesn’t want to
go home. He loves his homeland, his country, but what happened really
injured him in the most deep inside his heart.”
He suggested this is because many refugees were forced out not by
military occupation, but by their fellow citizens.
Fr. Bader said that King Abdullah II of Jordan and some other Arab
leaders are speaking out against the persecution of Christians, and
both Christian and Muslim Jordanians have worked to help Christian
refugees fleeing Islamic State, though the priest said more opposition
to the violence is needed.
The refugees’ sufferings have been a major contrast for Jordanian
Christians, who have lived in peace.
“Sometimes we feel that our faith is without real political problems.
It’s good. We have all that we need. Thank God for this, thanks for
the leadership,” the priest said.
“But we have to learn from these people, that you have to be ready for
any new ways of the Cross.”
From: A. Papazian
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/iraqi-christians-say-theres-no-going-home-after-rise-of-islamic-state-52687/