by Mardean Isaac
The travails Iraq has undergone in the decade since the invasion in 2003 have largely played out among, and between, the country’s major ethno-religious groups: Sunni and Shia Arabs, and Kurds. But Iraq’s Christians have suffered disproportionately since the fall of Saddam. Their numbers have fallen from at least 800,000 on the eve of the war to fewer than 400,000 today. Those who have been displaced internally continue to struggle to find a future in Iraq or Iraqi Kurdistan, and those who have fled the country have encountered little support from their western host countries.
The travails Iraq has undergone in the decade since the invasion in 2003 have largely played out among, and between, the country’s major ethno-religious groups: Sunni and Shia Arabs, and Kurds. But Iraq’s Christians have suffered disproportionately since the fall of Saddam. Their numbers have fallen from at least 800,000 on the eve of the war to fewer than 400,000 today. Those who have been displaced internally continue to struggle to find a future in Iraq or Iraqi Kurdistan, and those who have fled the country have encountered little support from their western host countries.
Iraqi Christians are culturally and linguistically distinct from
other Iraqi communities. They are ethnically Assyrian: non-Arab,
non-Kurdish peoples who trace their heritage to the ancient Assyrian
empire. They speak a colloquial dialect of Aramaic, though the majority
of the liturgy and literature of the Iraqi churches is in Syriac, the
classical form of middle Aramaic which produced a wealth of seminal
Eastern Christian texts.
Persecuted extensively under the Baathist regime because of their
ethnicity, the war and its aftermath exposed Iraqi Assyrians to the
horrors of violence and criminality unleashed by Islamist groups, who
subjected Christians to an extensive campaign of kidnapping, ransom and
murder. As Iraq descended into civil war, Christians – having no
militias or security forces of their own, and unprotected by a national
security apparatus heavily tied to the sectarian gangs involved in the
conflict – were cleansed from their neighbourhoods, either killed or
intimidated with threats of murder. The most extreme culmination of the
campaign came on October 31 2010, when an al-Qaeda affiliate calling
itself the “Islamic State of Iraq” stormed the Our Lady of Salvation
church in Baghdad during evening Mass, killing almost 60 people and
injuring 80 more in the worst single attack on Iraqi Christians since
2003. Church bombings have become a habitual occurrence in Iraq: 72 have
been attacked since 2004.
Thousands of internally displaced Christians fled from urban centres
to stay with relatives or to attempt to establish themselves among
Christian communities elsewhere in Iraq. Iraqi Kurdistan has been a
prominent destination. The autonomous region has been spared the
upheaval the rest of the country has gone through since 2003, and the
consequent security and stability, coupled with Kurdistan’s
considerable oil reserves, have attracted economic investment and
development. But the incoming Christians have been largely unable to
make lives for themselves there. The journalist Matteo Fagotto
interviewed some of them on his recent trip to Iraq. He found a
community “who don’t feel they have a future in their own country”,
struggling to find employment and housing.
The gravity of the problems faced by Christians in Kurdistan is
reflected in the work of the International Organisation for Migration
(IOM). They have noted that the number of displaced families in
Kurdistan has been dropping starkly, as they seek to move to
neighbouring countries or the West. In a recent publication of the IOM,
details emerge of exorbitant house prices, rising with the demand
incurred by the large numbers of new arrivals, and difficulties with
finding employment and schooling.
Resilient and dignified nations, whose tribes have long inhabited the
same lands, Kurds and Assyrians have had a complex history, which has
witnessed both camaraderie and betrayal. Many Assyrian militias fought
alongside Kurdish ones against Saddam, and Assyrian villages and
churches were destroyed in the Anfal campaign. Today, however, Assyrians
and Kurds find themselves on very different ends of Iraqi politics. The
Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the ruling body of Kurdistan, has
expanded its authority and territory of jurisdiction since the war,
while Assyrian politics remains ineffectual.
The Kurdish theft of Assyrian land, which began under the auspices of
the no-fly zone, has continued unabated. In late 2011, a group of Kurds
rioted unimpeded in Zakho, a northern Iraqi town, burning down
defenceless Christian shops and homes. The KRG, which has been
criticised heavily for arbitrary detention and freedom of speech and
assembly violations, has intimidated Christian voters and political
leaders seeking to assert the rights of Christians in northern Iraq,
such as Bassim Bello, the governor of Tel Kippe, a largely Christian
area in the Nineveh province. Bello and others wish to establish – under
terms of ethnic self-determination according to demographics in the
Iraqi constitution – a semi-autonomous governorate in the province in
order to provide a safe haven for minorities.
The Nineveh region is a crucible of Assyrian civilisation and the
only one in Iraq composed primarily of minorities, Christians around
half of them. The KRG flooded the area with militiamen in the aftermath
of the invasion, securing a presence in the territories, which belong to
Iraq proper, and continues to refuse to allow minorities to train their
own security forces to replace the occupying Kurdish forces. Bids in
parliament for a referendum over control of the region have been vetoed
by the Kurdish government, which hopes that an exodus of minorities and a
continuing influx of Kurds to the area will swing the vote, and the
control over oil and gas that will accompany it, their way.
The Assyrian-Swedish journalist Nuri Kino recently wrote a report on
the horrors faced by the Iraqi Christians who fled violence in their own
country for Syria, where anti-Christian violence has become
increasingly common. He told me that while many are returning to Iraq,
the Nineveh Plains in particular – almost all those who fled their homes
in Baghdad have since had them occupied, and have no legal recourse to
reclaiming prior residences – their focus is on migration to the West.
But western states have been sending large numbers of refugees back in
recent years: even Sweden, once the European country most receptive to
those fleeing Iraq, has deported hundreds of Christian families in the
past few years, back to peril, if not doom. So the extirpation of
Assyrian Christians from their ancient lands continues: from old homes
to new ones and back again, finding repose in none.
Mardean Isaac is a writer and graduate of the MSt programme in Syriac Studies at Oxford University
