ishtartv.com
- windsorstar.com/
Raf
Sanchez and Josie Ensor, The Telegraph/
ON
THE last Sunday of October, the church bells in the Iraqi Christian town of
Qaraqosh rang out for the first time in two years.
The
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) had been driven out, leaving behind
only the dead bodies of their fighters and the churches that lay desecrated but
not totally destroyed.
Christians
have lived and worshipped in the region since the first century AD, and in the
heady days after Qaraqosh and neighbouring villages were liberated, people
spoke excitedly about a new dawn.
But
in a nearby refugee camp, Thamer Ghayath, a 35-year-old father of two, had
quiet doubts. Ghayath had been a security guard at his church in Qaraqosh but
fled as ISIL swept in.
He
said he was frightened not only of the jihadists but also of his neighbours
from Sunni Muslim villages, some of whom had helped ISIL identify Christian
homes, then moved into them, forcing out their occupants.
“I
believe they wish to cleanse the area of all Christians,” he said. “Christians
are no longer safe in the Middle East. While Daesh may be expelled for now,
there will be another ISIL tomorrow.”
His
fears are echoed in Christian communities across the Middle East. While 2016
may have been the year that the Islamic State was pushed back and towards
defeat, its two years of violence have left Christians with wounds created by
fear and distrust that may never heal.
In
interviews throughout the Middle East, Christians of many backgrounds wondered
aloud whether ISIL’s savagery was the symptom, not the cause, of a wider hatred
against them. They said their minority faith made them targets for specific
brutality.
And
they questioned whether there was any future for Christians in the lands where
Jesus and his earliest followers once walked.
The
trends are starkest in Iraq and Syria, where few citizens of any religion have
been spared the horrors of war.
Before
the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, there were around a million Christians in Iraq.
Today there are only 200,000.
“The
decline has continued to such an extent that there could be no Christians left
in five years,” said John Pontifex, spokesman for Aid to the Church in Need, a
Catholic charity that tries to help persecuted Christians.
The
community in the Nineveh plains around Mosul is described as “the beating
heart” of Iraqi Christianity and has faced the most devastation from ISIL. Much
hangs on what they decide for their future.
Archbishop
Bashar Warda, of Irbil, says his flock is now divided into thirds: one third is
eager to return home; one third wants to quit Iraq; and the final third has not
made up its mind.
Around
two-thirds of Syria’s 1.5-million Christians pre-war have fled, and only the
poorest remain, according to Antoine Audo, a Catholic bishop from Aleppo. Those
who left were fleeing the fighting and deprivation, but Christians are also
targeted for persecution by ISIL and other Islamist groups.
Syrian
Christians are usually wealthier and better educated than their fellow
countrymen, making it easier to start new lives abroad, and many doubt they
will return. “We love our country but we no longer feel our country loves us,”
said one.
The
exodus of Christians is not limited to those countries worst affected by
jihadist violence.
George
Matar is a sprightly 69-year-old from Beit Jala, a Christian village next to
Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. The retired electrician, who speaks
English with an American accent after years in the US, said many of his friends
are Muslim, and Palestinians of all faiths share the same burdens and
humiliations from the Israeli occupation. Now Beit Jala’s Christians have begun
to wonder whether the violence seen elsewhere could happen to them too, Matar
said.
“When
they see news they get so scared that their neighbours might one day turn on
them. They wonder what is in the minds of the Muslims.”
Five
of Matar’s seven children now live in the U.S., leaving in search of
opportunities and freedoms far from the Israeli checkpoints and a restrictive
Palestinian culture. That trend is even more accelerated in Gaza, where there
are just 1,300 Christians left among a population of 1.5?million.
There
is little future for anyone in Gaza, said Natalie Sayegh, an 18-year-old
student, but young Christians are leaving at an especially rapid rate. “They
leave to go to Jordan and they don’t come back. They go on to America or
somewhere else,” she said. “It’s too difficult here.”
The problem,
say Gaza’s Christians, is not the Hamas government, but the Israeli blockade
that is suffocating life.
Cardinal
Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, when he visited a Gaza church,
spoke of his admiration for “these young people who try to live today
positively without knowing what their hope will be for the future”.
“All
across the region there are hundreds of thousands of Christians who have faced
a choice to give up their faith or give up their homes. And almost invariably
they give up their homes,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
The
Middle East’s largest Christian minority is in Egypt, where nine million Copts
make up a tenth of the population.
Coptic
Church officials were relieved when the elected Muslim Brotherhood president
Mohammed Morsi was overthrown in a military coup in 2013 and replaced by Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi, a traditional strongman who – like Bashar al-Assad in Syria –
has presented himself as a defender of religious minorities against Islamists.
But
Sisi’s authoritarian government has been either unable or unwilling to shield
the Copts from terrorism and sectarian violence. A suicide bomber walked into a
Cairo church during Sunday prayers on December 11 and blew himself up, killing
27 people, mostly women and children. ISIL, which has an active branch in
Egypt’s Sinai desert, claimed responsibility for the outrage and Sisi declared
at a state funeral that the attack cause “pain to all Egyptians”.
The
bombing was just one of 47 anti-Christian incidents recorded in 2016 by Eshhad, a group
that monitors religious persecution in Egypt, and many of the victims said the
government did little to help them.
Take
the case of Ashraf Abdu Atiyah, a 33-year old man from the Karma village in
Minya province, where 500 Coptic Christians live among 11,000 Muslims. Atiyah’s
neighbours accused him of having an affair with a Muslim woman and he fled the
village in fear. The family twice appealed to police but were ignored, they
said.
On a
Friday afternoon in May a crowd gathered outside the house and, failing to find
Atiyah, they set upon his 65-year-old mother, beating her and parading her
naked through the village streets. The frenzied attack came to an end only when
a Muslim man spread his jellabiya, a traditional garment, over her and took her
to safety.
“She
is devastated, she doesn’t leave the house, she sits alone with her head in
hands and crying. She can’t imagine what happened to her,” Atiyah said.
There
are quieter spots for Christians in the Middle East.
Jordan’s
Christians live in relative prosperity although they have watched a recent
spike in extremist violence with alarm, including the assassination of a
prominent Christian intellectual. Lebanon’s confessional system of politics has
proved surprisingly durable and Christians hold many major public positions,
including the presidency. And inside Israel Christians live with security and
citizenship, even if they sometimes face the same discrimination within the
Jewish state as Muslim Arabs.
Two
millennia of Christian history in the Middle East has seen much violence and
many trials for the people known respectfully in Arabic as Masihi (of the
Messiah) or disparagingly as Nasrani (those from Nazareth). But the first 16
years of the new millennium have been among the most destabilising and
existential yet. They will be praying for a more peaceful 2017.
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