MOSUL’S CHRISTIANS SAY GOODBYE
Assyrian International News Agency AINA
June 24 2014
By Christian Caryl
I’ve been reading the headlines from northern Iraq over the past two
weeks with an intensifying sense of dread. It’s a feeling very much
like the one I have whenever I read about the disappearance of some
huge ice sheet in the Antarctic or the extinction of yet another rare
species of animal. It’s the feeling that one more valuable ingredient
of life on Earth is about to vanish, in all likelihood, forever.
The takeover of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, by the jihadist
troops of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is a catastrophe
for the people of Iraq, who now face a revival of full-blown sectarian
warfare, and a strategic and psychological nightmare for the United
States, which sacrificed vast amounts of blood and treasure to topple
Saddam Hussein and build a viable government — the latter, it would
seem, in vain.
But over the past few days I’ve found myself mourning a more specific
disaster: the flight and dispersal of the last remnants of Iraq’s
once-proud community of Christians. Emil Shimoun Nona, the archbishop
of the Chaldean Catholics of Mosul, has told news agencies that
the few Christians remaining in the city prior to the ISIS invasion
have abandoned the city. Now there is no one left,” he said. Most
of them have joined the estimated 500,000 refugees who have fled
the ISIS advance; many of the Christians, including the archbishop,
have opted for the relative security of Iraqi Kurdistan. (The photo
above shows girls praying in the Church of the Virgin Mary in Bartala,
a town to the east of Mosul.)
The exodus has been triggered, above all, by the jihadists’ reputation
for bloodlust — a reputation that ISIS has consciously furthered
through its own propaganda. A few days ago, the jihadists used social
media to distribute photos supporting their claim that they had killed
1,700 Shiite prisoners taken during their rapid offensive. No sooner
had ISIS entered Mosul than some of their fighters set fire to an
Armenian church. This all seems consistent with the group’s grim
record during the civil war in Syria, where, among other things,
it has revived medieval Islamic restrictions on Christian populations.
(It’s their fear of Islamist rebels that has tended to align the
Syrian Christian community with the secular regime of Bashar al-Assad.)
In 2003, it was estimated that some 1.5 million Iraqis were Christians,
about 5 percent of the population. Since then, the overwhelming
majority has reacted to widening sectarian conflict and a series
of terrorist attacks by leaving the country. (Archbishop Nona’s
predecessor, Paulos Faraj Rahho, was kidnapped and killed outside his
Mosul church back in 2008.) Almost all of the various Iraqi Christian
communities — the Chaldeans (who are part of the Roman Catholic
Church), the Armenians, the Syriac Orthodox, the Greek Orthodox —
have benefited from large emigre contingents around the world who
have welcomed refugees from Iraq.
I’m glad that these believers have saved themselves and their faith,
but their emigration comes at a cost — as they themselves are only too
aware. Even if the ISIS forces are ultimately driven back, it’s hard to
imagine that the Mosul Christians who have fled will see a future for
themselves in an Iraq dominated by the current Shiite dictatorship of
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which enjoys strong support from Iran.
It’s worth adding, perhaps, that Christians aren’t the only ones in
this predicament. Iraq is also home to a number of other religious
minorities endangered by the country’s polarization into two warring
camps of Islam. The Yazidis follow a belief system that has a lot in
common with the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism; about a
half a million of them live in northern Iraq. The Mandaeans, numbering
only 30,000 or so, are perhaps the world’s last remaining adherents of
Gnosticism, one of the offshoots of early Christianity. By tradition
many Mandaeans are goldsmiths — a trade that has made them prominent
targets for abduction in the post-invasion anarchy of Iraq. Losing
these unique cultures makes the world a poorer place.
In the fall of 2003, when I was on assignment in Iraq, I had a
chance to travel to Mosul. It was a fateful moment for the U.S.-led
occupation, then just a few months old. I interviewed Gen. David
Petraeus, the commander of the American forces in the city and its
surrounding region. The insurgency that had already flared into life
in other parts of the country was only just reaching Mosul; while I
was there, several American soldiers were attacked by an angry mob
and killed — a harbinger of long years of violence to come.
But I soon discovered that there was a lot more to Mosul than the
headlines. The citizens of Mosul I met welcomed me with a spontaneous
hospitality that I hadn’t really experienced in the Iraqi capital.
This may have had something to do with the fact that Baghdad, the
heart of Saddam Hussein’s brutal Baathist state, retained little
palpable sense of its rich historical past. Baghdad had an almost
Soviet soullessness — the vast tracts of ugly prefab housing wouldn’t
have looked out of place in Warsaw or Beijing. Mosul, by contrast,
still retained its character as an Ottoman trade route city, a place
both scruffy and intimate. And it was enlivened by a proud sense of
its own diversity: You never knew whether the next person you were
going to meet was a Sunni or a Shiite, a Kurd or a Christian.
The Christians were especially fascinating — above all, because it
was hard to escape the sense that you were witnessing the practice of
traditions you weren’t going to find anywhere else. Some of Mosul’s
Christians answer to Rome; some follow various Orthodox patriarchs;
and some, like the members of the Ancient Church of the East, are
beholden to no authority but their own.
I found myself admiring the interior of the Syrian Orthodox Church of
Mar Toma (St. Thomas), brilliantly lit by long strings of light bulbs.
The parishioners were especially proud of their big display Bible
in the ancient tongue of Syriac, whose elaborate calligraphy adorned
surfaces in many parts of the building. (The church is also home to
a set of rare manuscripts in Syriac and Garshuni, a dialect of Arabic
used by medieval Christians.) No one actually knows how old the church
is, but it dates back at least to the 8th century. I also paid a
visit to St. Paul’s Cathedral, the seat of the Chaldean Christians’
archbishop, a stolid stone building that looked as though it could
withstand any attack. A year later it was bombed by jihadi insurgents,
badly damaging the structure.
For what it’s worth, the city’s long history of peaceful coexistence
doesn’t seem to be completely dead. Archbishop Nona has told of Muslims
in Mosul banding together to guard the city’s churches from looting,
and other reports from Mosul suggest that the Islamists are trying
to assuage the fears of religious minorities in the city.
But the Christians of northern Iraq can hardly be blamed if they’re
unwilling to bank on these faint glimmers of hope — the jihadists’
record speaks too eloquently against them. Back in 2003, there was
little inkling of the disaster that was about to befall Iraq’s
Christians. Today, there seems to be little that can be done to
reverse it.