By Aleteia
John Burger
Iraq’s prime minister, Haider Al-Abadi, after declaring the liberation
of Mosul from the Islamic State, urged Christians to return to the
country’s second largest city.
Al-Abadi on July 10 called on “all displaced people and the sons of
religions, nationalities and creeds [to] come back, including Christian
brothers in particular, to their homes in Mosul” because “the natural
response to Daesh is to live together.”
But, three years after most of Mosul’s Christians fled the Islamic
State group’s takeover there, will they trust the situation enough to go
back from their places of refuge in northern Iraq? One Christian
activist doubts it.
“The liberation of Mosul applies just on the military level. It is
under the control of the Iraqi government by now. But it doesn’t mean
Mosul is liberated from the mentality, ideology, behavior, environment
of Daesh,” said Father Emanuel Youkhana, using the Arabic slang for the
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. “In the city of Mosul there is
still the environment and the culture and the mentality and the
ideology of Daesh, which was present in Mosul before it was occupied by
Daesh in 2014, and will stay in Mosul after the liberation on the
military level.”
Father Youkhana, an Assyrian priest who runs the Christian Aid
Program of Northern Iraq, spoke on the sidelines of a July 14 United
Nations conference in New York on religious leaders’ role in combatting
ideologies that can lead to atrocities.
“No Christian, no Yazidi will go back to the city of Mosul,” he said.
Even before ISIS controlled Mosul, Christians were systematically
attacked in the city, he said, noting that after 2003, Christians and
their churches were paying money to Islamist groups who were controlling
Mosul.
Father Youkhana said he visited the Assyrian Cathedral of St. Mary in
Mosul in the wake of the city’s liberation. The cathedral is in a
Muslim neighborhood, and is being used as a garbage dump, he said, in
spite of the fact that Mary is a revered figure in Islam.
“And now, after three years of Daesh controlling every detail of life
in Mosul, the feeling toward non-Muslims is even tougher, more
radical,” he said. Once things settle down, Christians will return to
claim their properties—only to sell them and move elsewhere, he
predicted.
“Unfortunately, the 2,000-year old Christian town of Mosul, I would
say with deep pain, is over,” he stated. “There is no single Christian
or Yazidi young person who will go to study in a university in Mosul.
There will be no Christian or Yazidi woman who will go to give birth in
the hospitals in Mosul. What are the alternatives? There will be no
Christian or Yazidi who will go to market his products from Nineveh
Plain from his farm in Bashiqah or whatever, to go to the market in
Mosul. They will not risk. So what are the alternatives?”
If Christian internally-displaced persons stay in Iraq, he said, they
are more likely to settle in the historic Christian towns of the
Nineveh Plain nearby, particularly in the northern part, which has been
retaken by the Peshmerga, the Kurdish militia, and is controlled by the
Kurdistan Regional Government, which enjoys a degree of autonomy in
Iraq.
“This is stable, and people are going back to places like Tel Eskof,
Bashiqah, Bahzani, all these Christian and Yazidi towns,” Father
Youkhana said. The southern part of the region, he added, which includes
the Christian towns of Bartella and Bakhdida, is controlled by the
Iraqi army and Shi’ite militia. “People are returning, but there are
questions: What will be the future of them? Who will be in charge of
security? What will be the administrative structure of Nineveh Plain?”
Father Youkhana argued for the establishment of a Nineveh Plain
Province, “so that people can be convinced that they are not monopolized
and not controlled by Arab Sunnis, to convince them that they are home
and they have their future there.”
Meanwhile, 10 aid agencies are collaborating in the Nineveh Plain
Reconstruction Project, to rebuild homes in towns and villages that have
been recovered from ISIS occupation.
“There are seven or eight towns that were mainly Christian,” said
Edward Clancy, of Aid to the Church in Need USA, one of the
participating agencies. “Currently, there are about 95,000 Christians
left from the 300,000 that fled from the Nineveh Plain. We’re doing our
best to help them return to their homes.”
An Aid to the Church in Need analysis earlier this year found that
there are about 13,000 homes and about 400 church properties in one of
three states: those that have minor damage; those that are burned but
still standing, and those that are completely destroyed. “The engineers
estimated it will be about $250 million to repair or replace all the
homes,” he said. “We don’t have the survey estimate on the church
properties yet.”
Clancy said the Churches and the hierarchy are encouraging people to
return to their homes. Most Christians IDPs in and around Erbil are no
longer living in camps but in rented apartments, subsidized by the
Church and aid agencies. But funds will dry up eventually. He said the
Archdiocese of Erbil has found through surveys that people are leaning
more and more toward returning to their towns and villages. In 2016,
less than 5 percent said they would like to return. In April or May of
this year, after the liberation of Nineveh Plain towns and villages, 41
percent said they wanted to return, and 47 percent said would consider
it.
“Once there’s enough population [in the towns and villages], others
will consider it,” Clancy predicted. “There will be a community there,
the Church will be functioning, there will be schools.”
Hani El-Mahdi, the Iraq country representative for Catholic Relief
Services, said that CRS has started to see some of the Christian IDP
families moving back to the Nineveh Plain.
“They’re not huge numbers so far, but we are observing what will
happen over the summer, particularly with the areas declared to be
liberated,” El-Mahdi said. “They are still in need of massive assistance
because they are returning to villages and towns that still need
infrastructure assistance to rebuild their houses.”
El-Mahdi said that some areas on the Nineveh Plain are contested by
the KRG and the central government in Baghdad, “so there’s a lot of
anxiety for the long-term future. People need stability and safety to go
back to those areas. This is contingent on reaching a lasting political
agreement between the Kurdish government and the central government.”
