IN 2019, I met with leaders from the Nahla Valley in Iraqi Kurdistan whose eight villages are both Muslim and Christian. Entire villages had been forced to evacuate when they were caught in the crossfire between rocket attacks launched from Turkey against Kurdish militias in northern Iraq. Children and community members were traumatized.
This February, border communities in northern Iraq were attacked again, this time by militants using Iranian-supplied weapons. Several rockets exploded in Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. One rocket hit the U.S.-led coalition military base, killing a civilian contractor from the Philippines and injuring at least six others. Many interpret the Irbil attack as a test of the Biden administration’s Iran policy, which seeks to revive the nuclear deal scrapped under the previous U.S. administration. President Joe Biden retaliated with airstrikes targeting Iranian-backed militias on the border in Syria—killing 22 people. The minority communities, including Christians, living in the Kurdish regions of neighboring Turkey, Syria, and Iraq continue to be caught in the middle as geopolitical conflicts escalate.
Christians have lived in the border regions of what is now called Iraqi Kurdistan, the historic homeland of the Assyrians, since the Middle Ages. During the 1800s, inspired by European nationalism, these Christians increasingly identified as Assyrians rather than Arabs. Now Christian refugees from Syria are also arriving in northern Iraq, displaced by more than a decade of civil war in their own country.
The Assyrian Christian communities have faced the threat of extermination before—first under the Ottomans during World War I and then under the Islamic State group. In the years following the Islamic State group invasions, the situation for Christians and other minority groups in Kurdistan, such as the Yazidis, has been tenuous. Conflict escalation such as airstrikes from Turkey, missile attacks from Iran, and ground assaults by Islamic State groups and others have resulted in damage to property, livestock, and livelihood, as well as trauma, fear, and sometimes physical harm and loss of life in these minority communities. Now, as geopolitical tensions worsen between Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the U.S., the threat of extermination rises again. Fear on the ground increases. Will their communities survive another spiral of violence and retaliation?
Our 2019 visit included traveling with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), an international organization that accompanies communities experiencing violence, to visit Kashkawa, a village near the Turkish border. CPT members worked with that community to document human rights abuses and record the impact of cross-border bombings. At the Assyrian church there, Christians prayed over us in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, that the bombings would stop.
One plea from the people of Kashkawa was that Christians in the U.S. would challenge our government to stop direct and proxy military interventions. With renewed U.S. missile attacks as well as militant violence this year, the plea from Kashkawa remains.
Mae Elise Cannon is ordained in Word and Sacrament in the Evangelical Covenant Church. She serves as executive director of Churches for Middle East Peace and is the author of several books, including A Land Full of God: Christian Perspectives on the Holy Land.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!
