ASIA/IRAQ - Patriarch Sako on the expulsion of Christians from the Nineveh Plain ten years ago: "The collective tragedy is still ingrained in people's minds"

by Fabio Beretta

Baghdad (Agenzia Fides) - Although the black flag of the Islamic State no longer flies over the Nineveh Plains, "only 60 percent of Christians have returned". It is a collective tragedy, directed against Christians and other minorities, that is still ingrained in people's minds. The Islamic State may have been defeated, but its ideology remains strong, and not only in Iraq", said the Patriarch of the Chaldean Church, Cardinal Louis Raphaël Sako, to Fides on the tenth anniversary of the expulsion of Christians from the Nineveh Plains. They were awakened in the middle of the night by Islamists and forced to leave their homes, leaving behind all their belongings. Whole families were thrown out of bed with loudspeakers: "People were forced to flee in their pajamas", reported Sister Luigina of the Chaldean Daughters of the Immaculate Virgin Mary to Fides after that terrible night. "The Christians had to leave everything behind, even their shoes, and were forcibly led barefoot towards Kurdistan," said another witness. In total, around 120,000 Christians left the Nineveh Plain that night. A very high number when you consider that they included Christians who had fled Mosul a few weeks earlier. The flight of the Christians from the IS militias did not actually begin on August 6, but in June 2014, when the so-called Islamic State managed to conquer the city. At the beginning of that summer, at least 1,200 Christian families lived in Mosul alone.
At the beginning of this century, there were still more than 100,000 Christians in Mosul alone, embedded in a social structure in which the Sunni majority lived peacefully alongside Shiites, Yazidis and other minorities. But even before the atrocities of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the number of Christians had decreased after the first US military intervention that led to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003. Since then, sectarian violence has increased.
Suffering and difficulties continue to this day, as Cardinal Sako points out: "Exclusion from work due to sectarianism, personal status law and especially the Islamization of minors when one of their relatives becomes Muslim, lead Christians to no longer believe in the future."
For the Cardinal, "the sectarian and tribal mentality that still exists must be overcome. We need a modern, democratic, civilized State based on citizenship. We must no longer speak of majority, minority, Christians, Jews, Shiites, Sunnis, Yazidis and so on, but of citizens. We are all citizens with equal rights and duties."
To these problems are added "the worrying current situation in the Middle East and the fear of total war". The result is "the emigration of more than a million Christians abroad, which has greatly reduced the number of Christians in Iraq. And Christians continue to leave the country. It is estimated that 100 Christian families leave Iraq every month".
In 2014, Christians left Mosul even before the conquest of the city, which began on June 10. On June 12 of the same year, the then Chaldean Archbishop of Mosul, Amel Shimon Nona, confirmed to Fides that the vast majority of the 1,200 Christian families had long since left the city. He and his priests had found shelter in the villages of the Nineveh Plain, such as Kramles and Tilkif.
In the following weeks, the exodus continued. The houses of Christians in Mosul were "marked" along with those of Shiites as homes that could be expropriated by IS supporters as the so-called caliphate continued to expand. At the beginning of August, militiamen arrived in the Nineveh Plain, exactly where the Christians had found refuge. For the jihadists, conquering the area was no problem: the Kurdish Peshmerga militias stationed between Mosul and Qaraqosh had to retreat because they had to cover another front that had been opened near Kirkuk, one of the cities in Iraq with the most oil fields.
Mortar shells announced the arrival of IS fighters at the beginning of August. On the night of August 6-7, it was either convert or leave. And so the Nineveh Plain, home to the oldest Christian communities in the world, emptied. Thousands flocked to the border with Iraqi Kurdistan, which granted them permission to enter just hours later.
Today, ten years later, the return of Christians to Mosul and the Nineveh Plains seems like a “mirage”. The dates on the return of Christians are uncertain and there are no confirmed figures. In seven years (Mosul was liberated in 2017, ed.), very few Christian refugees have returned to their homes in a stable manner. "There are about 30-40 families, often not complete. Many of the returnees are elderly," stresses Cardinal Sako.
"The Iraqis," continued Patriarch Sako, "and especially the Christians, hope to live in a real, democratic civil State that treats the 'minorities' according to the principle of citizenship and equality, respects their rights and allows them to live a dignified life. But I believe that this project is still a long way off," said the Chaldean Patriarch.
"To date, several families come and go from other places, but they do not represent a stable presence that can be noticed," confirmed Paul Thabit Mekko, the Chaldean Bishop of Alqosh, to Fides. "I believe," the prelate says, "that more than 90% of Christians who fled Mosul do not intend to return. What they have seen and suffered has created a psychological wall. Some were displaced, others felt betrayed. We do not know if the situation will change. Today, many of them live in Ankawa, the Christian-populated district of Erbil, where they feel safer and where there are more opportunities to work. They do not think they will return to a city that has changed a lot compared to when they lived there. They would not recognize it."
According to the latest statistics, Christians still represent 7% of the total of over 600,000 displaced people still living in the Kurdistan Region. Local authorities indicate that few Christians who fled Mosul and the Nineveh Plain during the reign of IS have returned to their former areas of residence in recent years. By the end of 2020, 55,000 of Iraqi Christian refugees living in Kurdistan had already gone abroad, mostly to countries in North America, Australia and Europe, as well as other countries in the Middle East. Even then, this multitude of Christians living abroad accounted for about 40 percent of the nearly 138,000 baptized Christians who had found refuge in Kurdistan after fleeing Mosul and the villages of the Nineveh Plains. In 2022, similar flows of Christian population migration were recorded in other areas of Iraq. A report prepared two years ago by the Rudaw Media Network (a Kurdistan-based publishing group) collected testimonies from priests and laypeople confirming a sharp, progressive decline in the local Christian population.
According to the testimonies collected, about 300 Christian families still live in the Basra region, while 50 years ago there were 5,000 Christian families in the same region. But as Palestinian Archbishop Michel Sabbah, Latin Patriarch Emeritus in Jerusalem, said, the questions and even the uncertainties that hang over the future of Christians in the Middle East "are not primarily a question of numbers, although numbers are important, but a question of faith." (6/8/2024)

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