Displacing The Believers: The Grim Realities Of Iraq's Beleaguered Christians

Editor's Note : This article continues Dr. Werthmuller's tour of Christian populations in the Middle East. See his reflections on the Arab Spring and on Christians in Egypt ( Part 1 and Part 2 ).

It should speak volumes about the plight of Christianity in Iraq that Patriarch Beshara al-Rai, the controversial head of Lebanon's Maronite Catholic community, recently warned about the situation in Syria by pointing to the mass exodus of Iraqi Christians over the last decade.

The statistics are sobering: between one-half and two-thirds of Iraq's nearly 1.5 million Christians have been displaced over the last decade, some internally and others to neighboring countries. Most of those Christian refugees fled more than Iraq's general turmoil: they escaped horrific, targeted violence by Islamic extremist groups and threats of more of the same. This places the Iraqi context at the forefront of anxieties among many of the Middle East's Christian minorities, who ask: "Can this happen to us?"

Rather than relegating them to a historical footnote or cautionary tale, however, we must remember that there yet remain hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians in their war-torn country and as refugees in surrounding countries, and they need our support and prayers more than ever.

In a strange twist of historical irony, Iraq lays claim to the oldest civilization in the world—Mesopotamia—and yet, as a modern nation-state, it is relatively young. It was one of a series of new states created by the League of Nations out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire following World War I. In this case, the League granted authority to Great Britain over the Mandate of Mesopotamia in 1919, which it held until bestowing independence on an Iraqi monarchy in 1932. From the first, it was an awkwardly delineated territory tucked alongside other mandates (e.g., Transjordan) and between the struggling monarchies of Persia to the east and the Ottomans (later the Republic of Turkey) in the northwest.

The awkwardness of Iraq's demarcation was not random, however. The French had divided Lebanon from Syria in part to grant Maronite Catholics a Mediterranean enclave to counter a Muslim-majority Syria. In a parallel strategy, the British planned an overarching Iraqi state that would pool its vast economic resources and defuse the separate ambitions of Iraq's three major people groups: Kurds in the north, Sunni Arabs mostly in the center, and Shi'ite Arabs—the most numerous community—predominant in the south.

This political background is crucial for understanding Iraq's Christian minorities, since Iraq from its inception was bound to identity politics and ethno-religious tensions, with only a shallow, tenuous sense of national character to hold these groups together.

Assyrians, like the neighboring Armenians, comprise a distinct people group with a close combination of ethnic and religious identity; they are also one of the oldest Christian traditions in the world, dating back to the first century. Several centuries ago, they divided into followers of the Chaldean Catholic Church and the Assyrian (Nestorian) Church of the East, forming Iraq's largest and second-largest Christian sects, respectively. These communities now maintain distinct identities as well as ecclesiastical and doctrinal differences, but both follow Eastern Orthodox rites based in a Syriac liturgical tradition (a dialect of Aramaic, which Jesus spoke). Assyrian/Chaldeans were also among the first of Iraq's minorities to suffer under its shallow, tenuous nationalism.

By the time of Iraq's independence, the twentieth century had already been cruel to the Assyrians—75,000 to 150,000 of them died at the hands of Ottoman authorities and rival Kurds in the same wave of massacres that killed up to 1.5 million in the Armenian Genocide—and thus some of their leaders argued for the protection of Assyrian autonomy in the north of the country. In 1933, the weak monarchy pushed back against what it perceived as a threat to its fledgling independence from this upstart, British-allied group of Christians, by sending the Iraq army to subdue Assyrian militias.

In the process, however, the army's unruly soldiery allied with local Kurdish tribes in a stunning fit of violence, sparked by fragile nationalism and fueled by religious bigotry. They pillaged dozens of Assyrian villages, slaughtered anywhere from 600 to 3,000 of their inhabitants, and—in an eerie precursor to the present day—drove thousands of Assyrian refugees out of the area, many of whom fled to neighboring Syria. This event remains a day of mourning for Assyrians worldwide and, along with the Ottoman slaughter of Armenians in 1915, served as a somber inspiration to Raphael Lemkin for his introduction of the term "genocide" to the League of Nations in 1933.

Fast-forward to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, to late Ba'athi Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and we find a marginally more secure situation for the nation's religious minorities. By that time, Iraqi Christians—Assyrian/Nestorian, Chaldean, Syrian Orthodox, and a variety of Armenian, Protestant, and other groups—were loosely protected by the same staunchly secular system that maintained an iron-fisted, authoritarian order over the whole country. After 70 years, a sense of Iraqi national identity was firmly in place, but despite this apparent stability, the old affiliations and tensions simmered just beneath the surface of Iraqi society. This was especially true for the restive Kurds and disadvantaged Shi'a, as was evident in the regime's violence against both following the first Gulf War in 1991. (In this sense, no one was really safe from the Ba'athi regime, which had no compunction during that crackdown about decimating northern Assyrian villages along with Kurdish ones.)

The American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and its subsequent occupation until late 2011, served as a major catalyst for a breakdown of that social order (such as it was, tightly controlled but presided over by a lawless regime). Within weeks of the fall of Hussein's government, the policy of de-Baathification served to clear the country of virtually all leadership but its traditional tribal and religious framework. In the meantime, the proliferation of Shi'ite and Sunni militias combined with an influx of foreign mujahideen , a widespread atmosphere of anarchy, and a devastated economy to create an unpredictable and violent atmosphere throughout the country. That violent setting affected all Iraqis, of course, and it was particularly hostile to any perceived "other" in their midst—including Christians, whom many extremists labeled as natural collaborators with the American "Crusaders."

This hostility translated into horrific violence against Christian minorities almost immediately, a trend that was exacerbated by a culture of impunity that allowed virtually all of the perpetrators to escape without accountability or justice. The following examples, in fact, are only a sample of the broader, bloody trend: first, a series of church bombings around the country rocked the community between August and October 2004, killing at least fifteen. In October 2006, a Syrian Orthodox priest in Mosul was kidnapped, beheaded, and dismembered. In March 2008, masked gunmen snatched the Chaldean archbishop of the same city ; his body was found in a shallow grave several days later. In October 2010, al-Qaida-affiliated militants stormed a Catholic church in Baghdad in a brief siege that left over 53 Christians (including two priests) and 17 others dead, and a series of bomb and mortar attacks only days later targeted predominantly Christian neighborhoods of the city. Violence reached such a point in late 2010 that Archbishop Athanasios Dawood, representing Iraq's Syrian Orthodox community in the UK, took the shocking step of calling on his fellow Iraqi Christians to pack up and leave the country.

In fact, Iraqi refugees had already been fleeing the country's violence for neighboring Jordan and Syrian, likely reaching a peak in 2007 and 2008. Christians, however, came to be disproportionately represented among their ranks: they comprised only five percent of the Iraqi population, but they have been estimated to represent between one half and two thirds of all of the country's refugees and internally displaced persons. Most of those who left Baghdad and other parts of the Sunni and Shi'ite areas fled to Syria, Jordan, or Iraqi Kurdistan , where they have lingered in relative safety but with few opportunities for work or long-term stability. Although some Christian families are rumored to have crossed back to northern Iraq, the fate of the tens of thousands of Christian and other refugees now trapped in the socio-political chaos of Syria remains virtually unknown.

Given these dire circumstances, and the uncertain future of those fewer than 500,000 who remain, is it any wonder that Christian and other non-Muslim minorities around the Middle East are casting a wary eye on Iraq's Christians? And what can be done for them?

There are modest ways to help here in the United States: contact your congressional representatives and other policymakers, particularly those involved in foreign policy, and insist that they encourage international agencies and Iraqi counterparts to pay attention to this besieged community. Encourage them as well to consider seriously the plight of Iraq's hundreds of thousands of refugees, especially those whose status in Syria is unknown, those under Kurdish authority in Iraq's north, and those who are seeking resettlement in the United States and other western countries (e.g., expediting related asylum petitions).

Most important, do not forget Iraq's Christians: remember them in your conversations, in your political engagement, in your support for relief agencies, and in your prayers.

Displacing the Believers: The Grim Realities of Iraq's Beleaguered Christians