By IndipendentPatrick Cockburn
In the half-burned church of St Mary al-Tahira in Qaraqosh, several
dozen Syriac Catholics are holding a mass in Aramaic amid the wreckage
left by Isis. The upper part of the stone columns and the nave are
scorched black by fire and the only artificial light comes from three or
four candles flickering on an improvised altar. Isis fighters used the
courtyard outside as a firing range and metal targets set at one end of
it are riddled with bullets.
In his sermon, the Syriac Catholic Bishop of Baghdad Yusuf Abba calls
for the congregation to show cooperation and goodwill to all. But the
people of Qaraqosh, an overwhelmingly Christian town 20 miles south east
of Mosul, wonder just how much goodwill and cooperation they can expect
in return.
The Christians are still traumatised by the disasters of the last
two-and-a-half years. When Isis took Qaraqosh on 8 August 2014 it had a
population of 44,000, almost all Syriac Catholics, who fled for their
lives to Irbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government. Some
40 per cent of these have since migrated further to countries like
Australia and France or, within the Middle East, to Istanbul and
Lebanon.
But the 28,000 people from Qaraqosh who stayed inside Iraq have
understandable doubts about going home, even if Isis is fully defeated
and loses Mosul. “There is no security while Isis is still in Mosul,”
says Yohanna Towara, a farmer, teacher and community leader in the town,
but even when Isis is gone the Christians will be vulnerable. He says
that “the priority is for us to control our local affairs and to know
who will rule the area in which we live.” He adds that the need for
permanent security outweighs the need to repair the destruction wrought
primarily by Isis but also by US-led air strikes.
This destruction is bad enough, though it is not total. Isis fighters
set fire to many ordinary houses in addition to the churches in the
days before they left, but – possibly because there was no furniture
left to burn since it all had been looted – most of these houses look as
if they could be made habitable after extensive repairs. It will take
time because not only has the furniture gone, but cookers and fridges
so, even if light fittings or taps are still in place, there is no water
or electricity.
Isis did not fight for Qaraqosh and there are no booby traps or
improvised explosive devices. But they must at one time have thought of
doing so because they dug networks of tunnels in the nearby Christian
village of Karemlash as if they intended to wage an underground
guerrilla war against the Iraqi army. In the event, there are few signs
of Isis resistance, except the rather pathetic remains of burned out
tyres which they set fire to in order to create a smoke haze to impede
the visibility of the aircraft of the US-led coalition. There were not
many air strikes, but where they did take place the results devastated
whole buildings reducing them to heaps of rubble.
Visiting Qaraqosh from Irbil 40 miles away, it is easy to understand
why people displaced from Qaraqosh and in the rest of the Nineveh Plain
feel insecure and dubious about returning to their old homes, even where
they are still standing. They know that if they do they will be at the
mercy of Arab and Kurdish authorities eager to fill the vacuum left by
the fall of Isis and wishing to stake new claims to territory and
power.
Arriving at a Kurdish Peshmerga checkpoint on the main road from the
Kurdish region to Mosul at 9am, we make our way through crowds of people
originally from Qaraqosh waiting to pass through. “See how they are
treating people,” says a critical Christian observer. “People have been
waiting here since 5 or 6am, but the Peshmerga say they need a senior
officer to give permission for them to pass.”
After another two Peshmerga checkpoints, we reach an Iraqi army
checkpoint with whom the Christians have better relations. The Nineveh
Plain east of Mosul was home to a mosaic of minorities and its abandoned
villages show various levels of destruction, depending on their
sectarian and ethnic complexion. For instance, some had once contained
Sunni and Shia Shabak (a heterodox sect speaking a dialect of Kurdish),
but Isis had destroyed the houses of the Shia but left the Sunni.
Closer to Qaraqosh the checkpoints are manned by soldiers of the
Iraqi Army and local Christian members of the Nineveh Protection Units
(NPU) with their multi-coloured red, white and blue flags. Relations
between the NPU and the army appear good, but the soldiers are Shia and
at one checkpoint they had laid out a table and were serving sweet tea
and biscuits as part of the Shia Arbaeen commemoration. The diversity of
officially-sanctioned armed groups appears never-ending: at some
checkpoints there were also visible the dark uniforms of federal police,
whom locals say are recruited from the Shabak and Turkmen communities.
Fear of Isis had united diverse groupings and communities, but that
unity is showing signs of fraying. The Peshmerga are excluded from
fighting inside Mosul city, but are building a rampart and ditch to
denote their front line. The Kurds may be pleased to see Isis defeated
in Mosul, but if it is defeated by a reconstituted and effective Iraqi
army – very different from the large but ill-commanded and corrupt army
that fled from Isis in 2014 – then the balance of power in northern Iraq
will change against the Kurds.
The outcome of the war all over Iraq and Syria has ensured that
minorities that were once spread throughout the two countries, now only
feel secure if they can rule their own territory. But in Iraq the
Christians do not have the numbers to defend themselves.