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MIDDLE EAST: ‘SIX WEEKS’ MEDICINE AND ‘TWO MONTHS’ FOOD FOR DISPLACED IRAQI CHRISTIANS

Erbil clothing collection

ABIGAIL FRYMANN ROUCH reports for World Watch Monitor on the situation facing Iraq’s displaced Christian communities…

World Watch Monitor

The supplies sustaining displaced Christians in northern Iraq will run out “within weeks” but UN agencies, accused of ignoring them, have pledged to do better since the advent of US President Donald Trump, the aid co-ordinator for the Catholic archdiocese of Erbil said.

Without significant financial aid and sufficient care, Iraq’s remaining Christians, whose numbers have fallen from 1.5 million in 2003 to around 200,000, “could disappear within the next six to 12 months,” warned US-born Stephen Rasche.

Erbil clothing collection

Displaced Christians in Erbil have had to rely on handouts for food and clothing since fleeing Islamic State in 2014. Many have lost homes, savings and livelihoods. PICTURE: World Watch Monitor

 

“If we can’t hold this community together over the next six to 12 months, it will all be for nought.”

– Stephen Rasche,  aid co-ordinator for the Catholic archdiocese of Erbil

It is vital that the international community view them as “a threatened people on the verge of extinction, the victims of horrific genocide,” he added.

“If we can’t hold this community together over the next six to 12 months, it will all be for nought ,” he said, adding that the Christian presence in Iraq could be reduced to “a custodian population looking after old church properties”.

A clinic run by the archdiocese, which lies in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan and is caring for almost 100,000 Iraqi non-Muslims who fled Islamic State jihadists in 2014, has only 45 days’ medicine left, he said.

Aid to support the displaced, the majority of whom are Orthodox and Catholic Christians, has fallen because private donors are running out of money, he added, pointing out that the displacement crisis is now in its third year.

More than $US40m in aid has come from charities such as Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), Open Doors, the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, the Knights of Columbus and various members of the Caritas confederation – “all church-related,” he said.

Mr Rasche was briefing UK journalists on the situation in Erbil last week, on the morning after Wednesday’s terrorist attack in Westminster, London, in which five people were killed and as many as 50 injured. The attacker, Khalid Masood, was shot dead by police. The public briefing was relocated from the House of Lords to a nearby restaurant, because the Palace of Westminster was closed to non-passholders, however he been able to enter to address peers shortly beforehand. As well as outlining the critical shortages in medicines, he told peers that the diocese’s supply of food aid would run out in two months.

Noeh

Noeh finds the remains of one of his father’s books in the ruins of his family home. PICTURE: World Watch Monitor

MARBLES IN THE MIDST OF ASHES; AN IRAQI BOY RETURNS HOME ‘POST ISLAMIC STATE’

While the Iraqi military forces are pushing fighters of self-proclaimed Islamic State out of Mosul, their last stronghold, foreign ministers from 68 countries met in Washington last week to discuss next steps in defeating the militant group. They also discussed ‘post ISIS’ scenarios such as how to rebuild Mosul, as refugees start trickling back to their home villages.

Not far from Mosul, in the village of Karamles, 12-year-old Noeh returns to the home his family fled from in 2014. He finds the house’s interior completely burned out – only the walls, ceiling and roof survived the heat.

The fighters of Islamic State (ISIS) left a trail of destruction when they withdrew from the village at the end of October, 2016. Besides Noeh’s home, 445 other houses were burned out – but some would say these families were lucky compared to the 97 that saw their houses completely destroyed.

It’s a depressing walk through the dust and ashes of what’s left of their property. Everything is affected by the thick smoke that must have filled the house on the day IS fighters fled from the approaching Iraqi troops. Noeh walks around, picks up some stuff, turns things over with his shoes. Under the window sit the remnants of his bed. The metal frame even bowed in the heat of the flames.

Then Noeh discovers several marbles “My marbles! I had many of them.” The discovery encourages him to eagerly search for more. Alongside one wall of his room, he makes space on the dirty floor for his treasure. Soon he has tens of small marbles and some bigger ones. He smiles. One can only guess what he is thinking about. Maybe of those happier times before IS not only filled the headlines, but also walked into his beautiful village, so they had to flee for their lives. The day that he played marbles with his friends? After some time searching, he is satisfied. He has enough now to start playing again.

He walks into another room. “That was our computer,” he points at some pieces of metal, the only parts that survived the fire. Noeh finds a book. “My dad’s,” he says as he picks up the paper. Only the heart of the book survived. He drops it again, dust and ashes fly up.

For almost three years now, Noeh and his family have lived as displaced people in Erbil. Here the Karamles group mostly stayed together while receiving support from NGOs and faith communities.

Noeh’s house is on the edge of the village and he looks out from the rooftop. Not far away sits the massive building of the university, also badly damaged. Taking in the view, the boy is determined: “We want to return home. This is our land.”

Not everyone however feels the same way about the possibility of going back. Long before the hot summer of 2014, when IS strove to wipe out every remaining Christian vestige from those ancient lands, Iraqi Christians have seen the country they called home turning increasingly more hostile towards them.

Iraq’s Christian presence has been rapidly declining in recent decades. In the early 1990s, one and a half million Christians reportedly lived in the country. Today, at most 250,000 are thought to still be living there, half of them internally displaced. While they contemplate whether to return or not, some will look forward to it, while others are not sure that they ever will be safe again in Iraq.

– A CORRESPONDENT, World Watch Monitor

Mr Rasche also said that it was “absolute fact” that Christians were discriminated against when applying for exit visas through the UN for asylum purposes. Priests working with displaced and refugee Christians have expressed frustration at the difficulties experienced in obtaining these visas, and also at their bishops, some of whom have urged embassies to deny Christians visas in order to preserve the Christian presence in the Middle East.

His approaches to the UN for aid for the displaced minorities had been met with the response “no, your [expectations of Christians’ living] standards are too high” and  initially officials believed Christians not to be in desperate need because Christian agencies around the world had been quick to respond to their plight in 2014.

He said his requests to the UNHCR and the UN Mission in Iraq (UNAMI) had fallen “on deaf ears – up until the last several months”.

He linked officials’ “change of tone” to the start of the presidency of Donald Trump, who has vowed to improve efficiency at the United Nations, to which the United States is a major donor.

“People at the UN Mission in Iraq have changed their tone with us,” he said. “They’ve come to us in the last six weeks and said ‘we have to do better’.”

“One of the things the US [government] is not happy about is that none of the aid dollars have got to Christians. Many people in the US government are surprised to learn it hadn’t reached the Christians.”

This change was discernible, in his view, “not just in the US, or the UK, but globally,” he said. He attributed it to an improved understanding of the circumstances Eastern Christians are facing.

“It has taken this change in our intellectual consciousness to understand that the Eastern Christians are in a different reality…they’ve been the minority oppressed religion for centuries”.

He also said that Americans are surprised to discover that “Eastern Christians are the oldest Christians” and that the Christian presence in Iraq long predated missionary activity in the country.

However, a senior British defence adviser complained that religious literacy within the British civil service is still too low, and has linked the international community’s failure to reach Iraqi minorities with aid to their high levels of emigration from their homeland.

Major-General Tim Cross, a practising Anglican and a senior figure in the planning of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, told UK BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Programme that the lack of religious literacy within the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development (DfID) is evident “in the way aid was being given to the region, by DfID and others, largely to camps run by the UNHCR”.

He continued: “They don’t understand that for most of the minorities in the Middle East, who have suffered terribly over the last few years, they will not go into the camps because they’re too scared to do so”. Very little aid is reaching Iraq’s non-Muslims, such as its Christians, he said, “and we’ve seen the numbers of these minorities fall dramatically in the last few years.”

Meanwhile, Mr Rasche said that as displaced Iraqi Christians weigh up whether to return home or not, some are opting to settle in Erbil in the Kurdistan region, despite differences in language, qualifications and culture. Selling their land in Iraq, however, “finalises the elimination of the Christians” and has led in some cases to an increase in foreign, notably, Iranian influence, which has vastly increased since the Shia majority came to power after the removal of Saddam Hussein. “There’s real evidence that the money for these [land] purchases is coming from Iran,” he said.

 

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