"I was in Italy for 18 years, and when I came back here my mission
was to get Christians to stay here," he says. "The Pope in Lebanon two
years ago had established a mission to get Christians in the East to
stay here."
Father Yako laboured among the Syriac Catholics, one
of the oldest Christian communities in the world, who had seen the
number of Christians in Iraq decline from over one million at the time
of the American invasion in 2003 to about 250,000 today. He sought to
convince people in Qaraqosh, an overwhelmingly Syriac Catholic town,
that they had a future in Iraq and should not emigrate to the US,
Australia or anywhere else that would accept them. His task was not
easy, because Iraqi Christians have been frequent victims of murder,
kidnapping and robbery.
But in the past six months Father Yako has
changed his mind, and he now believes that, after 2,000 years of
history, Christians must leave Iraq. Speaking at the entrance of a
half-built mall in the Kurdish capital Irbil where 1,650 people from
Qaraqosh have taken refuge, he said that "everything has changed since
the coming of Daesh (the Arabic acronym for Islamic State). We should
flee. There is nothing for us here." When Islamic State (Isis) fighters
captured Qaraqosh on 7 August, all the town's 50,000 or so Syriac
Catholics had to run for their lives and lost all their possessions.
Many
now huddle in dark little prefabricated rooms provided by the UN High
Commission for Refugees amid the raw concrete of the mall, crammed
together without heat or electricity. They sound as if what happened to
them is a nightmare from which they might awaken at any moment and speak
about how, only three-and-a-half months ago, they owned houses, farms
and shops, had well-paying jobs, and drove their own cars and tractors.
They hope against hope to go back, but they have heard reports that
everything in Qaraqosh has been destroyed or stolen by Isis.
Christians who fled Mosul pray at a church in Qaraqosh
Some have suffered worse losses. On the third floor of the
shopping mall in Irbil down a dark corridor sits Aida Hanna Noeh, 43,
and her blind husband Khader Azou Abada, who was too ill to be taken out
of Qaraqosh by Aida, with their three children, in the final hours
before it was captured by Isis fighters. The family stayed in their
house for many days, and then Isis told them to assemble with others who
had failed to escape to be taken by mini-buses to Irbil. As they
entered the buses, the jihadis stripped them of any remaining money,
jewellery or documents. Aida was holding her three-and-a-half month old
baby daughter, Christina, when the little girl was seized by a burly IS
fighter who took her away. When Aida ran after him he told the mother to
get back on the bus or he would kill her. She has not seen her daughter
since.
It is not the savage violence of Isis only that has led
Father Yako to believe that Christians have no future in Iraq. He points
also to the failure of both the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan
Regional Government (KRG) to defend them against the jihadis. Christians
in Iraq have traditionally been heavily concentrated in Baghdad, Mosul
and the Nineveh Plain surrounding Mosul. But on 10 June some 1,300 Isis
fighters defeated at least 20,000 Iraqi army soldiers and federal police
and captured Mosul. The army generals fled in a helicopter. In mid-July
Christians in the city were given a choice by Isis of either converting
to Islam, paying a special tax, leaving or being executed. Almost all
Christians fled the city.
Kurdish peshmerga moved into Qaraqosh
and other towns and villages in the Nineveh Plain. They swore to defend
their inhabitants, many of whom stayed because they were reassured by
these pledges. Father Yako recalls that "before Qaraqosh was taken by
Daesh there were many slogans by the KRG saying they would fight as hard
for Qaraqosh as they would for Irbil. But when the town was attacked,
there was nobody to support us." He says that Christian society in Iraq
is still shocked by the way in which the Iraqi and Kurdish governments
failed to defend them.
Johanna Towaya, formerly a large farmer and community leader in
Qaraqosh, makes a similar point. He says that up to midnight on 6 August
the peshmerga commanders were assuring the Syriac Catholic bishop in
charge of the town that they would defend it, but hours later they fled.
Previously, they had refused to let the Christians arm themselves on
the grounds that it was unnecessary. Ibrahim Shaaba, another resident of
the town, said that he saw the Isis force that entered Qaraqosh early
in the morning of 7 August and it was modest in size, consisting of only
10 vehicles filled with fighters.
At first, IS behaved with some
moderation towards the 150 Christian families who, for one reason or
another, could not escape. But this restraint did not last; looting and
destruction became pervasive. Mr Towaya says that the Isis authorities
in Mosul started "giving documents to anybody getting married in Mosul
to enable them to go to Qaraqosh to take furniture [from abandoned
Christian homes]."
As so many had fled, there are few who can give
an account of how IS behaved in their newly captured Christian town.
But one woman, Fida Boutros Matti, got to know all too well what Isis
was like when she and her husband had to pretend to convert to Islam in
order to save their lives and those of their children, before finally
escaping. Speaking to The Independent on Sunday in a house in Irbil,
where they are now living, she explained how she and her husband Adel
and their young daughter Nevin and two younger sons, Ninos and Iwan,
twice tried to flee but were stopped by Isis fighters.
"They took our money, documents and mobile phones and sent us
home," she says. "After 13 days they knocked on our door and the men
were separated from the women. Thirty women were taken with their
children to one house and told they must convert to Islam, pay a tax or
be killed. We told them that since they had taken all our money, we
could not pay them." Four days later, some fighters burst into the house
saying they would kill the women and the children if they did not
convert.
Soon afterwards, Mrs Matti was taken to Mosul in a car
with three other women and a guard who, she recalls, threw a grenade
into a house on the way to frighten them. In Mosul they were taken first
to al-Kindi prison, formerly an army camp, but did not enter it and
then their guard got a phone call to bring them to a house in the Habba
district of the city.
In the house, she and the three other Christian women were put in
one room, next to another in which there were 30 Yazidi girls between
10 and 18 who were being repeatedly raped by the guards. Mrs Matti says
that "the Yazidi girls were so young that I worried about Nevin and told
the guards that she was eight years old though she is really 10".
They
told her that her husband, Adel, had converted to Islam. She asked to
speak to him on the phone, saying she would do whatever he did. They
spoke, and agreed that they had no choice but to convert if they wanted
to survive.
When they appeared before an Islamic court in Mosul to
register their conversion, their three children were given new, Islamic
names: Aisha, Abdel-Rahman and Mohammed. They went to live in a house
in a Sunni Muslim district and from there – here the husband and wife
are circumspect about what exactly happened – they secured a phone and
contacted relatives in Irbil. They said that they needed to take one of
their children for medical treatment in Mosul city centre, and, once
there, they had a pre-arranged meeting with a driver who took them by a
roundabout route through Kirkuk to the protection of the KRG.
The
trauma of the last six months has been overwhelming for the remaining
Christians in Iraq. The Chaldean Archbishop of Irbil, Bashar Warda,
heads an episcopal commission to help displaced Christians whom he says
number 125,000, or half the total remaining Christian population. Unlike
other displaced people in Iraq, the Christians are mostly cared for by
the churches. He says that there will always be a few Christians
remaining in Iraq, but overall "they have lost their trust in the land.
Some 80 or 90 are leaving every day for Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan."
Others would go if they had money and visas.
Mounting persecution
since 2003 and now the final calamity of Isis taking Mosul and the
Nineveh Plain has convinced many that they can no longer stay. The
archbishop suspects that, even if IS is driven back and Christians can
return to their homes, half of them will only stay long enough to sell
their property. Almost exactly a hundred years after the Armenian
Christians in Turkey were slaughtered or driven into exile, the end has
come for the Christian community of Iraq. "Have no doubt," concludes
Archbishop Warda, "that here is massacre, here is a tragedy."
Iraq’s Christian heritage
The
Christian communities in Iraq can trace their history back to the early
days of their faith. Most are Chaldeans, a small sect which is
autonomous from Rome but which recognises the authority of the Pope.
There are an estimated 500,000 ethnic Assyrians indigenous to northern
Iraq, south-east Turkey, north-east Syria and north-west Iran. This
group is so ancient that some of its members still speak Aramaic, the
language of the New Testament.
The country’s other major Christian
community is also Assyrian, and its Ancient Church of the East, having
embraced Christianity in the first century AD, is believed to be the
oldest Christian denomination in Iraq.
In addition to these
groups, there are small communities of Syrian Catholics, Armenian
Orthodox and Armenian Catholic Christians, as well as Greek Orthodox
and Greek Catholic communities.
Jamie Merrill
By Ansa
