By America Magazine (The Jesuit Review)
October 9, 2018
Kevin Clarke
October 9, 2018
Kevin Clarke
Around us the rubble of West Mosul throws a fine white dust into the
air that coats your clothing and grits your hair, covers your shoes and
camera lens, and gets into just about everything else. I find myself
briefly wondering what percentage of my newly acquired coating of Mosul
particles represents vaporized human remains. But people were not the
only things destroyed in this part of the Old City of Mosul, in northern
Iraq.
Just
a few blocks away, centuries of Muslim, Chaldean, Syriac Orthodox and
Catholic and Armenian places of worship are now little more than piles
of debris and gravel and dust. Some ornate door arches remain as
depressing reminders of the church architecture that used to stand here,
a clutch of faiths located together in the Old City. The church arches
had already been defaced by ISIS
militants with bullet blasts meant to remove crosses and other
Christian symbols even before the walls around them were demolished by
mortar rounds or U.S. and Iraqi air strikes. Of course, a spiteful ISIS
in retreat did its best to destroy what it could, so who did which
damage to what here is hard to say. The view from the collapsed roof of
the Syriac Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception (also known
as the Church of Al-tahira), parts of which date back to the seventh
century, is especially disheartening. Though the sounds of hammers,
cement mixers and construction saws at work rise to the roof of this
broken church, the perspective it offers is one of utter destruction in
all directions.
In the alley before the ruins of the Immaculate Conception church, a
pile of satellite dishes, cable boxes and computer innards block the
stairs to the collapsed roof. My impromptu guide to West Mosul, Yohanna
Towaya, a professor at a branch of the University of Mosul in the
Christian community of Qaraqosh, explains that ISIS had removed them
from homes to prevent residents from accessing local and international
television, then simply dumped the high-tech material accessories of
modern life into the ancient church yard. He has made many trips into
Mosul since its liberation from ISIS and considers his visits completely
safe. “These people are Iraqis; I know them,” Mr. Towaya says. “The
trouble came from outside,” he adds, referring to the largely foreign
composition of ISIS fighters.
Just the night before I had been visiting with a regional security
expert in Erbil, who went on at length about the dangers that awaited in
Mosul. Among them: snipers, IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and
Daesh—as ISIS is referred to here—sleeper cells looking for
opportunities to kidnap Westerners.
He said the United Nations had recorded scores of “security incidents” over the last month
in the city and area surrounding it. Two air strikes had been required;
ISIS tunnels continue to be uncovered and weapons stashes are
discovered.
“Who told you that ISIS is finished in this area?” he
asked. “It is not; ISIS is reorganizing itself.” Its members have shaved
their beards and melted back into the community, he warned. Whole
villages around Mosul remain under ISIS control; their wives and
children live in West Mosul, of course they are going back there, he
said. “We are still finding bodies and booby traps…. Even the police
can’t guarantee your safety.”
It was enough to guarantee a more or less sleepless night.
Now
I am sitting here among strangers, Sunni Muslims who have returned to
the gray dusty ruin of West Mosul to start over, and unbelievably I am
sharing a small glass of sweet Iraqi tea with them on what is mostly a
desolate block of near-collapsed buildings. Along this former commercial
corridor, a scatter of small shops have reopened in breakouts of color
among the gray and black of the blasted, burned-out storefronts.
The
tea shop owner and his patrons seem legitimately happy to have an
American among them, Westerners have become a rare sight in this part of
Mosul, and residents are keen to show what hospitality they can muster
under the circumstances. The shop owner opens a tap affixed to his alley
wall to demonstrate that his business has been reconnected to the
municipal tap water system. The tea he serves is hot and delicious and
sweet well beyond the American palate.
The old men here seem happy to linger over their glasses while the
young men drink up and move along, more business presumably to attend to
somewhere else. Remembering my conversation last night, I find myself
wondering who they are dialing on their cellphones as I finish my tea.
This
location, the shop owner tells me, had been used as a storehouse for
ISIS weapons. His old tea shop was located down the street but had been
too badly damaged for him to consider reopening. The former ISIS
munitions dump, however, makes a good restart for him. He manages about
10 customers during my visit.
One is a young man from the Red Crescent Society, a humanitarian
organization, eager to practice his English. Solane Ghazi explains that
most of the people at the shop live in the remnants of what had been
their homes. “This man’s house,” he says, pointing to one of the guests
at the tea shop, “was eradicated completely.”
Mr. Ghazi is eager
to send a message to the international community, imploring it to step
in more vigorously to rebuild Mosul. Just about no one here—or for that
matter anywhere else I have visited in Kurdistan or Iraq—has any
confidence that the Iraqi central government has the capacity to respond
to the challenge of rebuilding the city.
“They are poor people
here,” Mr. Ghazi says. “They don’t have water; they don’t have enough
money. Because of the destruction they have nothing, no food, no
electricity.”
Mr. Ghazi was born and raised in Mosul. What has
befallen his city is an utter disaster, he says, but he insists he has
confidence that West Mosul can be restored.
“Of course,” he says,
with a smile and a shrug. “When the people gather together and put their
hands to work in Mosul, there is nothing impossible here.
“But it needs the people gathering their hands together. It needs schools, it needs hospitals—all of these things.”
Despite his enthusiasm, it is hard to imagine how anyone is surviving
in West Mosul. Indeed, even the optimistic Mr. Ghazi only works in the
dust and ruin of West Mosul; he hangs his hat on the other side of the
Tigris. East Mosul has been largely spared of the destruction visited on
this side of the river, and life proceeds there much as before with one
glaring difference—with the exception of a handful of families,
virtually the entire Christian community has departed and most
Christians are convinced that is impossible to ever return to live in
Mosul.
Mr. Towaya grew up in East Mosul but now lives, as do
scores of other former Mosul Christians, in Qaraqosh. The city is itself
rebuilding after fierce fighting to reclaim Qaraqosh from ISIS left
much of it in ruin. He believes there are as few as 10 Christian
families who have returned to Mosul on either side of the river, “and
none of them with their children.” While many former residents have
returned to check on their former homes, few, so far, express any desire
to live here again. The consistent refrain is: “We can’t trust them
again,” referring to former neighbors who sided with ISIS when the
Islamist militants stormed the city or who joined in the looting and
destruction of Christian churches and homes.
Still, Mr. Towaya holds out his own hope for the restoration of
Mosul’s Christians despite the many challenges and the overall economic
and political gloom of contemporary Iraq. “One couple moved back and
they did not have to cook a meal for weeks,” he says. “So many of their
old [Muslim] neighbors were so happy to see them, and they just kept
bringing them meals.”
He believes that if the church can come
back, the people will follow. In West Mosul, the Old City had been the
focus of the community’s ancient spiritual life. It is hard to have much
optimism there.
But here in East Mosul, we come upon a surprising
site. It is Father Amanoel Adel Kloo, a Syriac Catholic priest who has
dropped by to check on the reconstruction of his East Mosul church, Our
Lady of the Annunciation. The old church building had been completely
destroyed by ISIS and in its place is rising a prefab worship space that
Father Amanoel intends to surround with a rectory, a caretaker’s home
and some residences for Christian students who are attending the
University of Mosul.
These students are coming from all over Nineveh to resume their
educations, but getting home at night has become a perilous obstacle
course of checkpoints and barricades manned by Iran-backed Shia Hashd
al-Shaabi militia, the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga as local and
regional powers vie for control of Nineveh. Better for their safety and their educations that they have a place to stay in Mosul, he explains.
Father
Amanoel was the last priest to escape from Mosul in June 2014 as ISIS
took over and in fact, was briefly detained by militants as he departed.
He is not sure why they let him leave. That awful night several sisters
and orphans traveling with them were abducted by the militants, he
says. Now after years serving his displaced community in Erbil and
Dohuk, he becomes the first priest to return to Mosul. “I will be the
cross for the people,” he says. His church will be open to all Mosul
Christians who return, he says—Orthodox, Chaldean, Syriac Catholic,
ready to serve all. On an exterior wall of the compound he points out
some graffiti left behind by the church’s former occupiers: “Christians,
the church is the property of ISIS.”
Not anymore.
“When
people see that there is a priest in Mosul, I think people will think
about returning,” he says. Is he not a little bit frightened to be the
city’s only priest? “When you have faith nothing will affect you,”
Father Amanoel says. “I see the hand of God in everything.”
Perhaps even in a small glass of sweet tea.