Witnesses to the unimaginable

By Axess Magasin & TV
Nuri Kino
July 19, 2019

Pascale Warda and I took a break between sessions of the Conference on Religious Freedom to which we'd been invited by the US State Department. 

It has been seven years since we last met. She has since been shot several times, seen her bodyguards killed, been a minister, lost her position, witnessed the rise and fall of Sunni al-Qaeda and Shiite mehdi militia, and most recently the Sunni terrorist organization ISIS' war crimes and crimes against humanity.

She is a Christian, Assyrian/Syriac, living in Baghdad and is a high-profile activist. An hour before our coffee break, she and her husband William Warda had just received a prestigious award from the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. They were rewarded for their humanitarian work and for their tremendous documentation of ISIS' abuse on Iraq's indigenous peoples. They are among the most important witnesses of a genocide of Christians and Yazidis.

I asked Pascale if she had any contact with Jacklin, one of the Christian women who were kidnapped and sold 18 times. Jacklin's story is important because she has been hostage in the home of one of the main leaders of ISIS. I had also recently interviewed Rita, another Christian woman who was kidnapped and sold several times and wanted to compare the two women's information. Pascale replied that she and Jacklin last spoke a week ago.

But she wants to hear more about the organization ADFA (A Demand For Action) that I had founded in 2014, and our latest operations in Lebanon, or rather the refugees we meet. She went through town by town, from south to north in Syria, the same for Iraq. She wanted to know if in our register of refugees, we have people who have been kidnapped from cities such as Qaryatayin, Homs, Aleppo, Deir el-Zor, Rasel-ayn, Qamishli and Khabour. We do. "In this way, we can map ISIS and other jihadists' attempts to wipe out Assyrians/Syriacs, other Christians and other non-Muslim groups, it is important that we can demonstrate the geographical spread," Pascale points out.

I replied that there are also families from Baghdad, Basra, Kirkuk, Mosul, Nineveh and Sinjar in Iraq among those we help.

We know the people, the victims of the terrorist attacks. Those who managed to survive and escape. I told Pascale about the mother of one of the young men who were shot in front of ISIS' cameras, one of all the videos that ISIS made sure ended up on the news worldwide. I met her a few weeks ago. I described those who were kidnapped from Northeast Syria, those from the middle of the country, people, families, children and parents as reported, as if they were numbers and nothing else. So many have died and been injured, you usually hear on the news. Numbers, nothing more.

During the time of the "The Ministerial on Religious Freedom" conference that Pascale and I were at in Washington D.C., Former British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt released his report on persecuted Christians in the world. Two hundred and thirty million are reportedly persecuted.

It claims that before the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime there were 1.5 million Christian Assyrians/Syriacs/Chaldeans and Armenians in Iraq, now there are fewer 120,000.

Pascale got upset, saying that Hunt's numbers are wrong, according to her organization's estimates, there should be over 200,000 Christians left in Iraq. She also felt that in this context we needed to talk about the Yazidis and the Mandaeans, the other two non-Muslim groups. More than 150,000 Yazidis reportedly fled Iraq after the assault on them in the summer of 2014. Three hundred and fifty thousand still live in tents as internally displaced people (IDPs) in northern parts of Iraq, which are Kurdish-controlled. How many Mandaeans are left in Iraq nobody knows, but most have reportedly fled, about 50,000.

I said that for us there is no significant difference between her and Hunt’s numbers. In human terms, they are equally tragic. And I said that I was more interested in the people-- children and women mainly, than statistics. Women like Feryal and her three children, Salwa and her two, Lina and her two, Iptisam and her daughter. They and many others. Forgotten victims of genocide.

According to Hunt’s report in Syria the Christian population has declined from 1.7 million in 2011 to below 450,000. And the persecution continues. The latest terrorist attack on a church in Syria occurred on July 11 this year. A few days later, 60-year-old Armenian teacher Suzan Dir Kirkour's body was found. She had been kidnapped, raped and then stoned to death. She was one of the last Christians in Yacoubiyeh, a city in the province of Idlib in Syria.

During Easter this year, we distributed over 30 tons of food in Beirut. When we go on charity trips, we have with us volunteers from countries like Sweden and Germany.

A friend of mine from the US, Richard Zoumalan, who is a plastic surgeon in Los Angeles was one of them. During the trips we usually visit refugees, especially those who have it the most difficult, who don't have anywhere to live or for example need emergency medical care but cannot afford it. During the first of such meetings, we met a Christian family from Hassake in northeastern Syria that had been kidnapped by ISIS. Zoumalan tried hard to hold back tears while the children told us about their time as hostages, with the world's most brutal terrorist organization. It didn't work. He broke down, and the children had to comfort him. I myself sat and thought mostly of logistics. Where would we find a home for them that wouldn't cost too much?

Our second visit was with a family who fled from ISIS brutality in Mosul in Iraq in the summer of 2014. They had three choices, convert to Islam, leave or die. ISIS had painted the letter "N" for "Nasrani" in Arabic, meaning Christian, on all buildings, shops, apartments and houses owned by Christians. They had stayed there even though most others had fled, since the first Christian had his head cut off before a camera in the fall of 2004. Until 2014, they had insisted that they were also part of Mosul and therefore did not intend to let Christians' existence disappear. But after their houses, shops and churches were targeted, it was impossible to stay. They fled, with only the clothes on their backs to save their two sons. ISIS took everything else.

The mother, Salwa, told us how they went all the way to Turkey where they paid large sums of money borrowed from relatives around the world, to be smuggled across to Greece. Her two sons, 10 and 8 years old, filled us in with details. They walked for three miles, then they crawled for another seven kilometers. When they arrived by the water it turned out that the vessel that would transport them was a small rubber boat of about 16 square meters. It would be used to smuggle 20 people.

The Iraqi family and two other families refused to go on it. They were afraid that the boat would sink and their children would drown. One of the smugglers pointed a gun at them, telling them that either they would go on or he would shoot the children. One of the refugees managed to overpower him. Uday, the father of the Iraqi family we visited in Lebanon took one of his sons on his back and the other in his hand and whispered to his wife to run.

Terrified of being taken by the Turkish border police, who they had heard were very brutal to Iraqis, and of the smugglers who would find them and hurt the kids, they hid for a whole week in the woods. Towards the end of the week, they had only grass to eat. The youngest boy became very ill and stopped breathing.

While Salwa and Uday talked I saw that Zoumalan was having difficulty breathing. He couldn't hold back his tears and walked out.

In the car on the way to the next family, I told him that he was not allowed to come along anymore, that he couldn't handle the situation professionally. He became annoyed and upset, and said that I had "embraced evil," that my brain had turned off, that I was not functioning as a normal person.

The day after, I tried to see the situation through his eyes, a successful Beverly Hills surgeon who had never met real misery before, who had not met a victim of war and definitely not a survivor of a genocide. He told me that every refugee we met was like a whole novel or feature film. He was of course right.

Six weeks later I was back in Lebanon. I had swapped Zoumala's eyes for a camera lens. He had opened my eyes. Every refugee is of course a story to tell. I had done it, told, over and over again. I warned, in several articles and reports, that the ethno-religious cleansing of non-Muslims in Iraq could culminate in a genocide. In recent years, however, along with colleagues, I have devoted myself more to being their voice through ADFA's lobbying efforts and by raising money for food and other necessities for some of them. Now we had recruited Elyas Salameh, a Lebanese filmmaker, to help us with the film that was given the working title” Limbo." It tell the stories of refugees who can neither return nor have a future elsewhere, who are in limbo.

Iraq was invaded by the United States and its allies in March 2003. In September of that year, the abductions of Christians began. Those who did not pay the ransom to bring home their relatives got them back in a bag, sometimes in five parts. Hundreds of churches were attacked, many times during service. Priests, nuns, and bishops were kidnapped or killed. Yazidis and Mandaeans, and Kakai who are also non-Muslim indigenous peoples, were also attacked in the same brutal way.

But it was almost impossible to reach the media or politicians. The brutal fact of the eradication of non-Muslims and moderate Muslims in progress was too difficult to understand or to want to face.

In the summer of 2014, the genocide reached its peak and, millions of people were displaced, entire cities and provinces were emptied of their population. ISIS boasted about their atrocities in front of cameras, they prided themselves on the slaughter of non-Muslims, but also of Shiites and other Muslims who did not follow ISIS' doctrine. They took sex slaves and sold them to each other in markets or through social media. They threw gay people off skyscrapers and cut off fingers that smelled of cigarettes. Over large parts of Iraq and Syria that they managed to take over, there was no more black fabric to be found. Women were forced to dress in niqabs, so that only the eyes were uncovered. If the smallest part of the body was visible, the woman was punished with a whip, in public. The heads of non-Muslims and Muslims who did not obey ISIS were put on poles. Sometimes the heads were given to little boys so that they could play football with them.

I had to immunize my brain against all of this, not because it is normal, not because it is not evil, but to be able to function, to not end up in a mental hospital, I had to freeze very emotional response. My organization contributed to the recognition of the genocide in the UN, the US Congress, the European Parliament and the British Parliament. We helped stop it. But victims and survivors are far from safe or secure.

But back to Lebanon and the film production. We started by filming children, children who had been kidnapped, who had to witness crimes against humanity. What does it mean? In this case, the abuses are so terrible that I don't even want to write them down. The children we interviewed all need therapy, they need professional help to process what they have experienced. But none of them will get it. A large part of them have not even attended school for several years. Most Christians flee to Lebanon as that country still has a large Christian population. But none of them want or can stay there. They can't apply for asylum here; they are not even registered and they have to look elsewhere. 

I looked 14-year-old Fadi in the eyes, he had not gone to school in four years. His parents were involved in an arranged car accident in Baghdad when he was only four years old. The father died; the mother was left paralyzed from the waist down. Since he and his mother managed to escape to Lebanon, Fadi has taken care of her. He washes, cleans, cooks and changes his mother.

An hour later we interviewed Yohanen. He has been kidnapped by ISIS, along with his entire family. He would rather not talk about how it was, but when I ask about his cousin who was kidnapped, he lights up. He wanted to tell me how he and other children were trying to stop the ISIS commander from "stealing" her. Her name is Claudia and was 14 when the terrorist "fell in love with her" and "stole" her. Yohanen is 16 now, when he was kidnapped, he was 11. He proudly says that he was not afraid of the terrorists, he had to protect his sisters who were then 9 and 3 years old. Yohanen's family managed to escape ISIS with their lives intact, when they paid large sums of ransom for them. We interviewed children after children, we met a large number of them, the child soldiers, the slave workers…

We in the film crew sat down to discuss the first days of interviews. We looked the children in the eyes and it struck us that we couldn’t exploit them, regardless of the parents' consent. They were in a tough situation. They were undocumented refugees in Lebanon and they wanted out, and were trying to get visas to Canada or Australia. They thought the movie we were producing might help them with that.

We decided to focus on the mothers instead, on the mothers and their struggle to save their children to give them a more tolerable life. Most of the people we talked to did not want to be interviewed for a movie.

There are several reasons for this. Some have children or other relatives who are still held in captivity. Some have disappeared, and in other cases, the families try to buy them back from the terrorists. They are also afraid of terrorists in Lebanon, that they will find them and hurt them again. Others are even afraid that ISIS will find them in the West, i.e. in Europe or North America or Australia. They know of cases in Germany, Sweden and Canada where victims been confronted by their Islamist terrorists, since they too have been accepted as refugees in these countries.

But Salwa, Lina, Sousou, Feryal, Iptisam and Wardiya, all of whom have experienced unbelievably traumatic events, are featured in the film, with both names and images.

The article was translated by journalist Daniela Babylonia Barhanna in Los Angeles, USA, and edited by Susan Korah in Montreal, Canada.