By The Atlantic
May 23, 2019
May 23, 2019
Emma Green
The
call came in 2014, shortly after Easter. Four years earlier, Catrin
Almako’s family had applied for special visas to the United States.
Catrin’s husband, Evan, had cut hair for the U.S. military during the
early years of its occupation of Iraq. Now a staffer from the
International Organization for Migration was on the phone. “Are you
ready?” he asked. The family had been assigned a departure date just a
few weeks away.
“I was so confused,” Catrin told me
recently. During the years they had waited for their visas, Catrin and
Evan had debated whether they actually wanted to leave Iraq. Both of
them had grown up in Karamles, a small town in the historic heart of
Iraqi Christianity, the Nineveh Plain. Evan owned a barbershop near a
church. Catrin loved her kitchen, where she spent her days making
pastries filled with nuts and dates. Their families lived there: her
five siblings and aging parents, his two brothers.
The Almakos had watched neighbors and friends wrestle with the same question: stay, or go? Now more and more Christians in the region were deciding to leave. The graph of the religion’s decline in the Middle East has in recent years transformed from a steady downward slope into a cliff. The numbers in Iraq are especially stark: Before the American invasion, as many as 1.4 million Christians lived in the country. Today, fewer than 250,000 remain—an 80 percent drop in less than two decades.
The Almakos resolved to go. They spent their remaining time in Karamles agonizing over what to bring with them, and what to leave behind. “You don’t know what you’re going to take,” Evan told me. “You have to discuss a lot of things: that one important, that one not important.” In the end, choosing among their possessions proved too difficult. They decided to leave nearly every keepsake and heirloom, including boxes of pictures of their family and of their two young children, Ayoob, then 12, and Sofya, 10. Catrin insisted on taking one sentimental item, a small cloth weaving of Jesus made in Italy.
On the Almakos’ last night
in Karamles, the people of the town descended on their house. It seemed
as if they all had a present they wanted Catrin and Evan to take to
family members in America: sweets, spices, clothes. Nothing you couldn’t
find in the United States, but “you can’t tell them that,” Evan said.
People in Iraq see the U.S. as a place of bounty, he explained, but it’s
still fundamentally foreign. Of the family’s three suitcases, one was
filled with these gifts from home.
One
by one, each of their family members tried to persuade Catrin and Evan
to stay in Karamles. Her older brother Thabet is a priest, and the
town’s most dedicated defender. “Don’t leave,” Catrin remembers him
saying. “Stay here.”
The last of the visitors, one of
Catrin’s sisters, remained until past midnight. The family was set to
depart in just a few hours, but Catrin couldn’t sleep. She lay awake
cataloging everything she would miss about her home and worrying about
the journey ahead. She had never flown on a plane. She had never been
far from Karamles. Once they departed, she thought, it would be for
good.
The family spent a few days in Baghdad. They had
layovers in Jordan, Germany, and New Jersey. Finally they arrived,
exhausted, in Detroit. They spent their first couple of weeks at a
cousin’s house. Catrin was desperately homesick. Gradually, however, the
family settled in. Evan found work in construction. Catrin got a job at
the Salvation Army. They rented a condo. The shape of a new life
emerged.
The Almakos had been in Detroit for less than
three months when they heard that the Islamic State was marching
eastward toward Karamles. The terrorist group and its precursor had long
been active south of the Nineveh Plain. Still, Catrin and Evan had
believed that their town was safe. They frantically tried calling and
texting their family members. They were now 6,000 miles away from
everyone they loved. No one answered.
The
precarious state of Christianity in Iraq is tragic on its own terms.
The world may soon witness the permanent displacement of an ancient
religion, and an ancient people. Those indigenous to this area share
more than faith: They call themselves Suraye and claim a connection to
the ancient peoples who inhabited this land long before the birth of
Christ.
But the fate of Christianity in places like
the Nineveh Plain has a geopolitical significance as well. Religious
minorities test a country’s tolerance for pluralism; a healthy liberal
democracy protects vulnerable groups and allows them to participate
freely in society. Whether Christians can survive, and thrive, in
Muslim-majority countries is a crucial indicator of whether democracy,
too, is viable in those places. In Iraq, the outlook is grim, as it is
in other nations in the region that are home to historic Christian
populations, including Egypt, Syria, and Turkey. Christians who live in
these places are subject to discrimination, government-sanctioned
intimidation, and routine violence.
They do, however, have an
influential and powerful ally: the United States government, which,
under President Donald Trump, has made supporting Christianity in the
Middle East an even more overt priority of American foreign policy than
it was under George W. Bush or Barack Obama. Since Trump took office,
the Nineveh Plain has received significant amounts of investment from
the U.S. government.
In
part, this foreign-policy position is grounded in domestic politics.
The conservative voters who helped elect Trump care deeply about
oppressed Christians, and they convey their concern through an
exceptionally effective lobbying machine in Washington, D.C. But the
plight of Christians in the region is also a natural cause for an
administration that views foreign policy as a struggle to maintain the
West’s global clout. For Trump, Christianity can be a bulwark of Western
values in a region full of perceived enemies.
Christians
who want to stay in their home country, administration officials say,
should have the choice to do so. But many families in the Nineveh Plain
are ambivalent about their future there. They harbor the same fears that
led Catrin and Evan to leave before the devastation visited by ISIS;
life has only grown more difficult for Christian minorities since. When I
interviewed families in the Nineveh Plain last year, almost all of them
admitted that they would leave if they had the chance. Even those most
committed to remaining worry that, no matter how much aid they receive
from Washington, they are still vulnerable. Christianity’s survival in
one of the places where it first took root will depend on whether they
decide to stay.
Night had fallen
in Karamles. It was August 6, 2014—the Feast of the Transfiguration,
which marks the biblical story of Jesus being transformed and named by
God as his son. For weeks, priests across the Nineveh Plain had been in
contact with Kurdish military forces, called the peshmerga,
about the imminent threat of ISIS, which had quickly advanced east.
Earlier in the summer, it had taken control of Mosul, just 15 miles from
Karamles. From inside Mosul’s Great Mosque, the cleric Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi had declared himself the head of a new Islamic caliphate.
Nevertheless, some in the Kurdish military said that they would defend
the area.
On this night, however, ISIS was on the move, and the peshmerga
decided to retreat. Around 11 p.m., Catrin’s brother Thabet rang the
bell atop St. Adday, the main church in Karamles, which is loud enough
to reach every house in the small town. Coming so late at night, the
familiar toll could only be a dire warning. Within a couple of hours,
nearly all 820 families were on the highway out of town, heading east
toward safety in the large, predominantly Kurdish city of Erbil.
Thabet
waited until he believed that everyone had evacuated before leaving
himself. Even as his people fled, Thabet had tried to remain optimistic.
“I had a small hope that maybe ISIS would not come,” he told me
recently as we drove on the dusty highway that stretches west from Erbil
toward Mosul. But as Thabet watched the peshmerga fall back, leaving Karamles undefended, he realized his town was lost. Within a few hours, ISIS fighters would arrive.
From
a young age, Thabet felt called to the priesthood. He loved serving as
an altar boy in his Chaldean church, which grew out of an ancient,
eastern rite of Christianity that is today aligned with Roman
Catholicism. After years of seminary education, including a stint in
Rome, Thabet was ordained in 2008, when he was in his late 20s. Pictures
of him and his family in the years before the ISIS occupation, and
especially before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, suggest a relatively
idyllic life. Politically, the situation was very different for
Christians during that time: Saddam Hussein oversaw a series of brutal
religious crackdowns while he held power, but his regime tolerated the
country’s Christian minority. One of his most visible advisers, Tariq
Aziz, was a member of the Chaldean Catholic Church.
Now Thabet watched as everyone he knew and loved fled his town. A small Christian enclave on Erbil’s outskirts swelled with the arrival of 13,200 displaced Christians from across the Nineveh Plain. Some people, including Thabet, had left without collecting basic necessities. “When I arrived, I was disoriented, because for two days, I didn’t sleep,” he recalled. “I had to take a rest and buy some clothes.”
Now Thabet watched as everyone he knew and loved fled his town. A small Christian enclave on Erbil’s outskirts swelled with the arrival of 13,200 displaced Christians from across the Nineveh Plain. Some people, including Thabet, had left without collecting basic necessities. “When I arrived, I was disoriented, because for two days, I didn’t sleep,” he recalled. “I had to take a rest and buy some clothes.”
With
nowhere else to go, some of the Christian refugees slept in the
courtyard of a church. “We gathered the people from the gardens, from
the streets, and created a small place for them,” Thabet said.
Eventually, many of the residents of Karamles settled into the second
floor of an unfinished apartment building; it had a roof but only two
walls. For 40 days, Thabet’s parishioners lived in the building, along
with hundreds of refugees from other towns.
It soon
became clear that the community’s displacement would not be measured in
days. Families began dispersing around Erbil; some were able to rent
apartments, while others moved into hastily constructed camps. Thabet
became his people’s unofficial leader in exile: part priest, part
beloved uncle, part unofficial mayor. As relief money and other
assistance began arriving from groups such as the Knights of Columbus,
it flowed through church officials like Thabet. When people needed
clothes or a place to stay, they came to him.
It
took more than two years for the Iraqi military to recapture the Nineveh
Plain. A few days before Karamles was liberated, Thabet ascended a
small mountain above the plain as government soldiers fought across the
region. Peering down through binoculars, he watched as smoke rose from
his hometown. When the fighting was over, he was the first resident to
reenter the town.
The devastation that awaited was breathtaking.
The hands of one life-size statue of Mary, robed in bright blue, had
been chopped off at the wrists. The bell of St. Adday, which had ushered
residents to safety the night ISIS arrived, now sat lopsided in its
tower. The church itself had been partially burned black; Thabet
believes that fighters may have set off explosives a few days before
they made their retreat. Decapitated statues of Mary and Jesus
surrounded the altar, along with the remnants of angels that had been
shot off the walls. Thabet found a torn piece of his ordination
vestments in the rubble—the only object he has to remind him of the day
he vowed to serve his community.
Slowly,
Thabet and the other priests in the area began the process of
reconstruction. Leaders in each town created detailed assessments of
local buildings and calculated the damage across the Nineveh Plain.
Thabet posted a large, color-coded map of Karamles by the door to the
rectory. One little square represented his parents’ house, tinted red to
indicate that it had been destroyed. Another showed Catrin and Evan’s
house—looted, but largely spared. In total, 672 houses were damaged or
burned. Nearly 100 had effectively been demolished.
In
the fall of 2017, the first of Karamles’s residents started coming home.
Slowly, the streets filled with small signs of community life: people
watering their yards and calling after roaming children, men sitting and
talking in bright-red plastic chairs beneath string lights that
crisscross at the center of town. As of this spring, 450 families have
returned, though in many cases to unfamiliar houses—those of relatives,
neighbors, or strangers who chose not to come home. A sign near the
church, in Arabic and misspelled English, declares Wellcome Back.
Yet
even now, the town’s liveliest blocks are dotted with empty homes
awaiting owners who may never feel safe enough to return. Some
Christians left the region entirely; others started new lives in Erbil.
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