President Trump and the Chaldean archbishop of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, Monsignor Bashar Warda (Photos: Alex Brandon/AP, Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images)
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WASHINGTON
— A senior Iraqi Catholic leader is urgently pleading with President Trump to
provide millions of dollars in aid to rebuild thousands of Christian homes
destroyed in the war with the so-called Islamic State, saying the survival of
that religious minority may be at stake.
“We
need more than words, it’s time for action,“ the Chaldean archbishop of Erbil,
Bashar Warda, told Yahoo News in an interview Monday conducted in a hotel in
Washington, D.C.
Asked
what he would say if he could meet face to face with Trump or Vice President
Mike Pence, Warda replied: “We need your help now, not tomorrow, not to think
about it, not to consult your adviser — with all my respect.”
Warda
said the homes of 14,000 Christian families in Nineveh province were damaged or
destroyed during the years of conflict against the Islamic State, also known as
ISIS, and that he hopes to gather about $262 million in aid to rebuild them as
well as to restore vital infrastructure — like roads, electricity and water. He
said he has looked overseas for help, because: “The Iraqi government had said …
that we don’t have money” for the effort. The final tally of destroyed
residences is likely to be higher because church authorities have not yet
gained access to the major Iraqi city of Mosul. In all, an estimated 100,000
Iraqi Christians left Nineveh, most of them finding refuge in Kurdish enclaves
like Erbil, where the archdiocese has played a central role in feeding,
clothing and housing them.
Trump
promised during the 2016 campaign to help Christians persecuted in the Middle
East. His team has repeated the finding of the Obama administration that ISIS
violence against Christians amounted
to genocide.
But
at an Oct. 3 House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee hearing, Stephen Rasche, legal
counsel and director of internationally displaced persons in Warda’s
archdiocese, testified: “I regret to say that we have still yet to receive any
form of meaningful aid from the U.S. government.”
Rasche
singled out career officials, rather than Trump aides, for blame. “While we
have found the political appointees much more willing to help us since January,
the fact is that even after the better part of a year, they have been unable to
move the bureaucracy to take meaningful action,” he said.
Iraqi
Christians have complained that international aid efforts put a priority on
helping those in the greatest need and that, despite the finding of genocide,
do not target religious communities. They would prefer that money to rebuild
their communities be channeled through local nongovernmental organizations,
notably the Nineveh
Reconstruction Committee, which groups together Nineveh’s various Christian
churches.
On
Oct. 25, their efforts got a boost when Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech
to Christian leaders in Washington in which he announced that Trump had ordered
the State Department “to stop funding ineffective relief efforts at the United
Nations” and instead “provide support directly to persecuted communities
through USAID,” the U.S. Agency for International Development.
But
the money has not flowed in, leaving the return of Christian families to their
homes in doubt. And with Iraq’s Christian population already at a low ebb — an
estimated 300,000 prior to the war with ISIS, with unreliable figures today —
the country may be at what Rasche in October called “a critical historical
inflection point” that will decide whether the Christian community survives in
Iraq.
“The
delay is not helping us,” Warda said.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Tom Malinowski, left, shakes hands with Archbishop Bashar Warda during his visit to the Chaldean Church in Erbil, Iraq. (Photo: Azad Lashkari/Reuters)
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