Archdiocese of Erbil

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By: Nate Madden | February 28, 2017

It has been several months since the effort to retake Northern Iraq and Syria from ISIS’ genocidal control began in full. Now, with some town and villages liberated, Christians and other religious minorities are still struggling to return to their ancestral homelands.

While the reconstruction may take years, there are a few things, say some involved in the humanitarian community, that President Trump — who’s promised to stand up for Middle Eastern Christians — can do to immediately allay their suffering.

In an interview with Conservative Review, Knights of Columbus Communication VP Andrew Walther said there are three major actions the administration can almost instantly take for those in the area’s post-genocidal regions.

1. Direct money toward communities that need it

“The [Christian communities] need money both to live in the near term and to rebuild in the longer term,” Walther said. But while the U.S. and international community are sending humanitarian resources to the region, religious minorities are currently seeing very little of it.

“The fact that Christians in Erbil — which is the largest community of displaced Christians in Iraq — have received zero dollars from the U.S. government and from the United Nations is really unbelievable,” says Walther, referencing claims made by Catholic Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil in a recent interview.

One problem is with the way aid is distributed — on a person to person basis — rather than at the community level, says Walther.

“So if someone needs some food, they’ll be fed,” he explains. “But a community itself could go extinct while we’re not paying attention to that.”

This disparity has left a void private organizations are desperately trying to fill. One such group is the Iraqi Christian Relief Council, headed by Juliana Taimoorazy, which has recently adopted the northern town of Teleskof with the goal of rebuilding it block by block.

But with the new White House administration has come newfound hope on the ground, the Knights of Columbus’ Walther says. Local churches and humanitarians have relayed to him the sense of a “new openness” to aid from the Trump administration, which could restructure funding mechanisms to ensure that resources get to communities like Archbishop Warda’s in Erbil.

Such a move would not be about privileging specific groups, Walther tells CR, but rather the “inclusion of people who have been left out” of the process so far.

“Why is it that Americans only use a religious test to prevent minority groups who are genocide survivors from getting aid,” Warda wondered in the interview, “or to prevent them from getting any kind of priority assistance based on the needs of their communities?”

2. Guarantee equal rights and local control

Beyond resources, structural changes will also be necessary for the wellbeing of those driven out by ISIS. And these are going to take time, patience, and continued involvement.

Jeff Gardener, director of operations at the Restore Nineveh Now Foundation, says that while there are some immediate deliverables, the process of restoring peace and stability for the Middle East’s religious minorities is going to be a long one.

“[Iraq] is not going to be a quarter-to-quarter fix,” explains Gardener, who has made regular trips to the country in recent years. “It’s going to have to set a corrective motion in place and let that play out over time.”

One phenomenon that Gardner has noticed is that the people of Iraq, especially its persecuted minorities, want some of the same things that those in the West have been calling for in recent months regarding their geographic area: sovereignty.

“Iraq is telling us what it needs for peace and stability,” said Gardner. “They’re telling us the same things that Americans have been trying to tell Washington for a long time … and that is sovereignty over the areas in which they live.”

Religious freedom is one of the most crucial of these needed changes. Walther pointed how several experts have equated the Iraqi government’s negligent treatment of minority groups to a subtle green light to ISIS.

“[Religious minorities] need equal rights,” says Walther. “And they need to stop being second-class citizens — because that’s how genocide happens.”

3. Reform U.S. refugee policy to ensure fairness for all religious minorities:

Another issue that still plagues these communities, Andrew Walther says, is fair treatment by U.S. refugee policies — an issue that he says is especially bad for Syria’s religious minorities. Such groups were repeatedly (severely) underrepresented in refugee intakes during the Obama administration, despite their persecuted status in the region.

As The Stream noted:

Obama admitted more than 12,000 Muslim refugees from Syria in Fiscal Year 2016, but fewer than 100 Christian refugees from the same country. Christians make up about 10 percent of the population in Syria, some 2.2 million people. Yet they only made up about one-half of one percent of Syrian refugees admitted that year.

“How is it that this is so stacked against the minority populations?” Walther asks. “Clearly, religious minorities — like Christians and Yezidis who were facing genocide — were having a very difficult time getting in.”

How can President Trump accomplish all this? By making one of his famous deals

The key to seeing these changes implemented is not a “boots on the ground” solution, but by President Trump utilizing his oft-touted bargaining skills to cut one of his legendary deals for the Middle East’s most persecuted.

“When you’re giving tens of millions of dollars of aid, military assistance, and loan guarantees to a country,” Walther tells Conservative Review, “I would imagine you’ve got some leverage. One way to use that leverage is say, ‘You really need to make sure that you have authentic freedoms for all your people.’”

“[America] still has an enormous amount of leverage because we are still the financial and military power in [Iraq],” the Restore Nineveh Now Foundation’s Jeff Gardner says. “And President Trump and his cabinet could pick up the phone and say, ‘This is what we need to have happen; this is the schedule that it’s going to happen on. Let’s do it.’ And things would start to roll out in days and weeks, rather than months and years.”

After several years of failed policy in the region, many Americans are doubtless demoralized in trying to do good in Iraq. But the current situation presents an opportunity to do right by marginalized groups devastated by Obama’s premature military withdrawal.

“There is a real opportunity for the U.S. to get it right [in Iraq],” Andrew Walther concluded. “To do nothing is really to allow the program of genocide and religious cleansing begun by ISIS to ultimately triumph. If we do nothing, what ISIS wanted could become reality.”