“Families, the old and the young, fled the only home they ever knew into the unknown. They found safety in Kurdistan.”
As ISIL took control of Mosul and the Nineveh plains, refugees flowed into Kurdistan. The most vulnerable among them were the Christians, whose numbers in Iraq had dwindled to approximately one-third of the 2003 estimate of 1.5 million. The instability following the U.S. led invasion in 2003 caused the number of Christians in Iraq to drop drastically. Unlike the Sunni and Shia populations, the Christians had no viable militia or defense units to protect or retaliate against opposing forces. Churches were attacked, clergy were kidnapped — the laity lived in fear and many sought refuge in neighboring Syria or Jordan.
As ISIL consolidated its control of Mosul and the surrounding region, reports emerged of Christians being given the choice to convert, pay jizya (a tax imposed by Muslims on non-Muslims, dhimmi), or die. The houses of Christians were reportedly marked with the Arabic letter “noon,” which resembles the letter “u” with a dot above it, and is used as an abbreviation for “Nasrani,” or Nazarene, which is at times used in the Middle East to refer to Christians. Families, the old and the young, fled the only home they ever knew into the unknown. They found safety in Kurdistan.
Christians are distributed throughout Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), but are concentrated in Ankawa, a neighborhood in the northwest part of the city, where the U.S. Consulate-Erbil is also located. Christians concentrated in Ankawa before the ISIL invasion of Mosul, but the numbers swelled as refugees poured in. To accommodate the refugees, church courtyards and other open spaces were used to set up tents while they awaited the arrival of living trailers.
Churches established programs, with aid from charities, western governments, and the KRG, to not just feed and care for the refugees, but also to give them some semblance of normalcy. One of the programs is led by Father Daniel, who manages operations at one of the Ankawa churches. At the church they have set up programs for kids where they can learn to play an instrument, operate computers, and read, write, and speak in English.
According to Father Daniel, when many of the children first arrived in 2014 they were given paper and crayons and given the opportunity to draw. What they drew was sad and haunting. Scenes of war, blood, and carnage filled the pages. It is not surprising, it had been their reality and much of what they had seen since they came into the world.
When asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, their answer was almost always some variation of soldier. Father Daniel was happy to report that after a few months in the church’s programs, the children’s pictures became happier; flowers replaced guns, rainbows replaced blood, and the characters in the pictures had smiles on their faces. Now, when asked what they want to be when they grow up, popular answers include doctors, so they can help sick people, engineers, so they can build things, and entertainers, so they can make people happy.
The desire to become a warfighter is no longer commonplace.
Father Daniel’s church is just one of many in Erbil that serves the Assyrian and Chaldean population, the former being Orthodox and the latter Catholic. There is even an Evangelical center. In December 2015, the Catholic University of Erbil was founded and opened its doors to students providing instruction in English and conferring degrees in economics, computer science, and information technology — seven bachelor programs are available in total.
In Erbil, Christians have found the type of safety and stability they have not enjoyed since before the war. They are free to wear their crosses around their necks, attend Mass or Liturgy on Sunday mornings, and put up Christmas trees and lights. While these may seem like little things in the U.S. and most other places, these acts were risks when the Shia and Sunni militias ran the streets of Baghdad and Mosul with relative impunity.
Christians are not the only religious minority to enjoy freedoms denied to them elsewhere in most Arab majority countries. The Yezidis, ethnically Kurdish, enjoy religious freedoms, but so to do Jews. While there are no functional synagogues in Erbil, there is a synagogue at the site where the minor prophet Nahum is believed to be buried near al-Qosh, a mainly Christian town north of Mosul, now under the KRG’s de facto jurisdiction.
Unlike other sites sacred to Jews in the Middle East, Jews can actually visit, as they are not denied entry into the KRG because of their ethnicity or religion. In fact, those with Israeli passports or Israeli visas in their non-Israeli passport, who are barred from entering most Arab and/or Muslim countries, are freely granted visas upon arrival at Erbil International Airport. The KRG has also created the position of Jewish Affairs Representative within the KRG’s Ministry of Religious Affairs to ensure Jews in Kurdistan are free to practice without persecution or hardship.
In Iraqi Kurdistan there is no systemic oppression based on religion. The KRG has been a beacon to the religious minorities oppressed elsewhere in Iraq and the surrounding regions. It is a place where those otherwise persecuted are free to exercise their religion without fear of repercussion from the government.
