After ISIS: Can Iraqi Christians Go Home Again?

DOZENS OF CHURCHGOERS are dressed in their Sunday best outside St. John’s Church in Qaraqosh, Iraq. Before entering, each person is individually searched. First, they are patted down for suicide vests. Then their bags are inspected for weapons.

It is Easter—the first to be celebrated in this church since Islamic State (ISIS) militants were driven out of Qaraqosh, formerly Iraq’s largest Christian-majority city, by Iraqi forces after nearly three years of conflict.

Everyone is cautious. A week earlier, ISIS suicide bombers killed more than 40 people, including themselves, at two churches in northern Egypt during Palm Sunday services.

“There is no difference between what happened last week in Egypt, and what is happening in Iraq,” Lt. Majd of the Nineveh Plain Protection Units told Sojourners. This sectarian militia formed after ISIS captured the northern region in 2014, and recently fought alongside the Kurdish peshmerga forces to recapture Qaraqosh from the Islamic State. Now the militia acts as a local security force, checking for weapons, land mines, and other potential threats.

“We have to check everyone,” Majd said, smiling while cocking his gun. “We are still being actively persecuted.” He ushers worshippers into the church.

Even though it has been more than six months since the fighting ended between Iraqi security forces, the Kurdish peshmerga, and Islamic State, vestiges are everywhere of the two-and-a-half-year ISIS reign. The centuries-old arches that adorn the church courtyard are riddled with bullet holes. No one has bothered to pick up the bullet casings, and they still pepper the ground leading to the church door.

Inside, “Allah Akbar”—“God is Great”—remains etched into the ornate marble pillars framing the altar, where ISIS extremists left their mark. Though the paint is frayed around the edges—a clear effort to remove it in time for the Easter services—it stubbornly remains.

“Before this, we only had the love of Jesus and Mary—we didn’t use weapons,” Majd explained. Now, he said, nearly everyone is armed. The protection of a once-strong community has shattered.

In years past, worshippers would have arrived on Easter Sunday at least an hour early to secure a seat. This year, only a few families have come in from surrounding villages or camps for “internally displaced persons.” By the time Mass begins, the church remains two-thirds empty.

“What is needed for this place to be stable is people,” Majd said, looking toward a few church-goers mingling in the courtyard. “We need people to come back and rebuild,” he continued. “We are a homesick people. And homesickness is just another version of death.”

‘We can’t go back like this’

Less than 20 miles away, many of Mosul’s majority Sunni Muslim population are returning to neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city. But displaced Christians are not so eager, even though most of their villages have been liberated for longer.

One reason is that their villages have been significantly more damaged. While ISIS fighters used all of Mosul and the surrounding areas as their playground, they intentionally destroyed the Christian villages because of their significance to the religious minority.

“We want to come back, with all of our hearts, but how can we when there is nothing to come back to?” asked Mounira Bahnan, a resident of Qaraqosh who now lives in Erbil’s Christian neighborhood of Ainkawa, along with thousands of other internally displaced persons from Christian villages outside of Mosul.

Though Bahnan came to the village to observe Easter, moving back to rebuild her destroyed home is not practical—and seeing the remains of her village is painful. “When we see our village, we become upset,” she said. “There is no electricity or water. Our homes are burned, and there is no guarantee that what happened will not happen again.”

Since many of the security forces who drove out ISIS have moved on to the front lines in the western half of the city, Qaraqosh residents are afraid that remaining ISIS sympathizers could threaten the village with suicide bombings or attract U.S. drone strikes as they have in other areas in eastern Mosul.

During Holy Week, the Chaldean Christian patriarch, Louis Sako, led an 85-mile peace march open to Christians and Muslims, to promote peace and an end to violence. The route began in Ainkawa and ended in Alqosh, another Christian city on the outskirts of Mosul. More than 100 people participated, according to a Vatican press agency. “There is no forgiveness when everyone tries to take the law into his own hands. It is up to us to open our eyes to the importance of peace, dialogue, and coexistence,” Patriarch Sako said. “Something is moving in Iraq. ... Finally, people are choosing to build bridges rather than put up barriers ... Peace must be achieved by us [religious leaders] as well as politicians, through courageous initiatives and responsible decisions.”

In some regions, civil society groups such as the Iraqi Social Forum are introducing participatory programs to rebuild communities after ISIS has left. In January, the Iraqi Civil Society Solidarity Initiative addressed alternatives to military intervention in communities torn apart by ISIS, including prioritizing economic assets to focus on transitional justice and compensation models to break revenge cycles; providing psychological support for victims and the integration of abducted women; limiting abuse by authorities; preventing politicians from using ISIS as an excuse for maintaining their own power; and developing nonviolence and peace education at all levels of society.

The residents of Qaraqosh, as Christians, feel particularly vulnerable and forgotten as the Iraqi government supports the liberation of the rest of the city but neglects the reconstruction of their villages. “If you keep on looking, you just keep on crying,” Bahnan said, holding back tears. “Everything has been looted and burned. We can’t go back like this.”

Rebuilding homes and lives

Many displaced Christians question whether they can bear to return to their ancestral lands and afford to rebuild their destroyed homes; others worry about the end of Christianity in Iraq.

“We, as Assyrian Christians, are on the verge of extinction,” said Juliana Taimoorazy, an Assyrian Catholic who grew up in Iran and founded the U.S.-based Iraqi Christian Relief Council. “The only way we can sustain our culture and our language is in our homeland.”

Iraq was once home to the fourth largest indigenous Christian population in the Middle East. When the United States invaded in 2003, Christians were accused of collaborating with the invading forces, triggering a series of attacks on Christians in Baghdad and Mosul. Christians were targeted in the street, forcing them to stay confined in their homes or flee for their lives. Al Qaeda suicide bombers blew themselves up inside churches, killing hundreds of people at a time.

Many Christians fled Baghdad and Mosul for the Nineveh plain—a historically Christian region and home to diverse religious minorities—for peace and security. But when the Islamic State stormed Mosul and the surrounding area in 2014, the few residents remaining in this predominately Christian region were given a brutal choice: convert or pay a “head tax.” If they refused, they would be killed. Those who could left the country. Others sought refuge in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region, migrating to Christian enclaves such as the Ainkawa neighborhood in Erbil, which has granted refuge to Iraqi Christians.

Fewer than 500,000 Christians are now left in Iraq, down from 1.5 million in 2003. Fearing religious extinction, many are advocating that the displaced return home now that ISIS has been driven out. “Good-hearted Christians in the U.S., or the West in general, hear that Christians in Iraq or Syria are being persecuted and immediately think that the international community needs to get them out,” Taimoorazy explained. “[But] they don’t want to leave their homeland. [They] want to live their lives where doctors can be doctors again and lawyers can be lawyers.”

However, most of those displaced by the fighting are more concerned with finding resources to rebuild their homes than with what their return might mean to the global Christian community.

“Of course I want my future to be in Qaraqosh,” Bahnan said, looking around the church. “But when I am here, I see only the land—I no longer see my home.”