According to numbers from the U.S. Department of State, there were 1.4 million Christians in Iraq at the time of the first U.S.-led Gulf War in 1991. By 2010, the United Nations pegged the number at 700,000, and today the high-end estimate for the number of Christians left is around 450,000. Some observers believe the real tally may be lower still, in the neighborhood of 200,000. The Christian presence in Iraq stretches all the way back to the era of the Apostles, which means that a church that took two millennia to construct has essentially been gutted in the arc of just two decades.
According to reports from multiple sources, the situation began to deteriorate most seriously in 2006. Attacks on Christian targets at the time included:
• A Catholic church and a Syrian Orthodox church in Kirkuk, as well as an Anglican church and the Apostolic Nuncio’s residence in Baghdad, were bombed in January 2006, killing three people.
• In September 2006, two other churches were attacked in Kirkuk and Baghdad, killing two people, one a child.
• Also in September 2006, Fr. Boulos Iskandar Behnam was kidnapped and murdered. His head had been sliced from his body and placed upon his lifeless chest, apparently in retaliation for controversial comments by Pope Benedict XVI about Islam.
• In November 2006, Isoh Majeed Hedaya, president of the Syriac Independent Unified Movement and an advocate for the formation of an Assyrian-Chaldean-Syriac administrative area in the Nineveh Plains, was murdered on his front doorstep.
• In December 2006, a high-ranking member of the Presbyterian Church in Mosul was murdered.
• In June 2007, a Catholic priest and three deacons were murdered outside of their church after saying Mass in Mosul.
Around the same time, radical groups adapted the tactic of demanding payment of jizya, or protection money, from Christian families and churches. A seeming point of no return arrived in March 2008 with the murder of Archbishop Mar Paulos Faraj Rahho, the Chaldean Catholic prelate of Mosul. In late February, Rahho had been kidnapped from his car in the Al-Nur district of Mosul, while his bodyguards and driver were all killed. Church officials would later report that immediately before Rahho was pulled from the car by his abductors, he called the church and said that no ransom should be paid for his release, because the limited funds of the church would be better used for good works. His kidnappers demanded $3 million, and when they didn’t get it, they killed Rahho, leaving his body buried in a shallow grave.
More recently, in the period from 2010 to late 2012, life has become even more perilous. Bombers targeted churches and homes, priests and faithful were kidnapped, and there were arson attacks on Christian-owned shops and other businesses, forced religious conversions, anti-Christian discrimination in the workplace, and attacks in the media. Reports released in spring 2012 showed that over the past eight years seventy-one churches were attacked, most of them bombed, with forty-four assaults on churches in Baghdad and nineteen in Mosul, a northern city with ancient Christian links. Leading church sources reported that nearly six hundred Christians had been killed in religious and politically motivated attacks—almost 60 percent of them in Baghdad, the rest mostly in the north. The dead included seventeen priests and one bishop who died in captivity.
In most cases, those responsible for the crimes said they wanted to rid the country of its Christians. Reports document the grotesque killing of very young Christians, including a seven-month-old baby and a pair of fourteen-year-old boys, one reportedly decapitated for being “a dirty Christian sinner” and another crucified in his village on the edge of Mosul. In May 2010, bomb attacks on a group of Christian students traveling on buses to Mosul University left at least one person dead and eighty wounded. Eyewitnesses say that shrapnel and shattered glass left many students dazed and bloodied, while a nearby shop owner died from the force of the blast.
Christians in Baghdad had fled in vast numbers following the October 31, 2010, siege of the Syrian Catholic cathedral of Our Lady of Salvation, which left fifty-eight dead. Within six weeks of the atrocity in the cathedral, sources indicate that more than thirty-two hundred Christians had fled their homes, and by the start of 2011 nearly six thousand had arrived in the north. Many of these displaced people were desperate for safe passage, ultimately to the West.
During the spring of 2012, the respected Catholic humanitarian agency Aid to the Church in Need carried out a fact-finding mission in Iraq. In key parts of the north, the mission concluded, extremism was becoming a problem, meaning that Christians were now unsafe in the very part of the country where they had sought sanctuary. An attack on Christians and their businesses in the ancient Christian city of Zakho in late 2011 showed the extent of the problem. In addition to the threat of physical violence, Christian leaders also reported that lower-level harassment and discrimination were gathering steam. A requirement that identity cards state the holder’s religion was reportedly making it easier for employers to discriminate against Christians in hiring practices and in salaries.
In January 2011, a senior priest from the Assyrian Church of the East, Archdeacon Emanuel Youkhana, told Aid to the Church in Need that Christians in Iraq were being systematically attacked in a coordinated effort to drive them out of the country. Youkhana described growing pressures for Islamization, including the fact that the music department at Baghdad University had recently been closed because music is incompatible with shariah law. He said that Christian women face growing pressure to wear the Islamic veil in public and are often subject to verbal abuse or physical attack for refusing to do so. Youkhana also denounced the state-controlled media for denying that Christians were subject to specifically religious persecution in Iraq.
In April 2011, a bomb exploded on Easter outside Sacred Heart Church in Baghdad’s Karrada district, leaving two policemen and at least two passers-by injured. In a second attack, obviously coordinated to occur at the same time, four police officers were wounded in a firefight with gunmen outside St. Mary the Virgin Catholic Church while people attending Easter Mass huddled inside.
In May 2011, the decapitated body of a twenty-nine-year-old Christian man named Ashur Yacob Issa was discovered in Kirkuk, a few days after he had been kidnapped. His family had been unable to pay the $100,000 ransom that Issa’s abductors had demanded. In August 2011, at least thirteen people were injured when a bomb exploded at Holy Family Church in Kirkuk. Another bomb planted near an evangelical church in the city reportedly failed to explode. These two attacks followed a bombing ten days earlier at St. Ephraim’s Syrian Orthodox Church, close to the Chaldean cathedral, in the center of the city. That bomb detonated at 1:30 a.m., so no one was injured in the attack, but it did extensive physical damage to the church.
In October 2011, two Christians were shot dead in Kirkuk. One of the victims, thirty-year-old Bassam Isho, was executed by an armed group, while the other, sixty-year-old Emmanuel Polos Hanna, was found dead by the side of a road leading to Baghdad. The Asia News agency quoted a source in Kirkuk as saying, “The attacks on Christians continue and the world remains totally silent. It’s as if we’ve been swallowed up by the night.”
In December 2011, Muslim extremists launched a campaign to force the closure of a beauty parlor in the Kurdish city of Zakho, triggering a series of riots in which Christians suffered the most serious fallout. Reportedly thirty people were injured, scores of Christians received death threats, and twenty Christian-owned businesses were set ablaze. The property damage was estimated at $5 million. As part of the mob violence, enraged youths threw stones at churches and homes belonging to Christians, and leaflets were distributed threatening the shop owners with death if they reopened their businesses.
In January 2012, gunmen opened fire on the residence of the Catholic archbishop in Kirkuk. Security agents and police returned fire, leaving two of the attackers dead and a third in custody. Officials did not release any motive for the assault, though many observers suspect it was related to a nearby incident three days before in which a member of the Iraqi parliament
was attacked.
In March 2012, extremist Muslim groups assaulted St. Matthew’s Syrian Orthodox Church in Baghdad, where bomb attacks left two guards dead and five others wounded. The assault came on March 20, the anniversary of the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion, as part of a coordinated series of bomb attacks across the country that killed at least fifty-two people. Officials at the time said it was unclear if the militants had specifically intended to target the church, though most observers felt the choice was deliberate.
SAUDI ARABIA
As counterintuitive as it may seem, Saudi Arabia is home to a mushrooming Christian community, numbering perhaps as many as three million, amid a total national population of twenty-eight million. There are believed to be eight million guest workers, with at least a third, and perhaps as much as half, being Christians drawn from the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Nigeria, Kenya, and other sub-Saharan African nations.
Guest workers who are not Sunni Muslims face severe restrictions on the practice of their faith. The Qur’an is considered the constitution of Saudi Arabia, and no provision is made for freedom of religion. Apostasy is considered a crime, and the accused can be put to death if he or she does not recant. There are persistent reports of “honor killings” in Muslim families when a conversion is discovered. In theory, the state tolerates private expressions of alternative religious belief, though in practice the religious police in Saudi Arabia, the Muttawa, sometimes harass and detain Christians even for private “house church” observances. Worshippers who defy the ban on public religious expression risk arrest, imprisonment, lashing, deportation, and sometimes torture. Reports suggest that migrant women often face the greatest difficulties, including sexual abuse and rape, which sometimes overlaps with religious discrimination. Some female guest workers allege that they have been threatened with rape if they do not convert to Islam.
According to Open Doors, a number of Christians have fled the county, in some cases believing that their lives are at risk. Even white-collar elites are not exempt. Speaking on background for fear of being identified, a senior Western executive with Aramco, the Saudi oil giant, said in 2012 that although he’s well paid and lives in luxury accommodations, he’s experienced harassment for his Christian faith both overtly and subtly. He called the situation akin to living in a “gilded catacomb.”
In India, a Catholic group called Christ Army for Saudi Arabia has organized fasts, protests, and other events to promote the religious freedom of Indian Catholics in Saudi Arabia. The group’s founder is an Indian priest named Fr. George Joshua, who spent four days in a Saudi prison in 2006 for celebrating Mass in a private home. Joshua was later expelled from the country by the Muttawa.
Sensitivities in the kingdom about protecting the country’s Islamic identity can sometimes be taken to almost self-parodying extremes. When an Italian soccer team came to play a match in Saudi Arabia, it had to blot out part of the cross on the team’s jerseys, turning their logo into a stroke instead. Even secular symbols associated with Christmas are banned; one year, in an American school, a Santa Claus barely dodged the religious police by escaping through a window.
Often, however, the climate of restriction on religious freedom is no laughing matter. In January 2009, an Eritrean Protestant pastor named Yemane Gebriel was forced to leave Saudi Arabia after receiving numerous threats from the Muttawa that he would be arrested and potentially harmed while in prison if he didn’t leave. According to reports, Gebriel had led an underground Christian community in the country composed of more than three hundred believers, most of them fellow Eritrean nationals working in the country.
Also in January 2009, the religious police arrested and imprisoned a Saudi national named Hamoud Bin Saleh for describing his conversion to Christianity on a blog titled Christ for Saudis. Bin Saleh was released in March 2009 but placed under a ban on travel and prohibited from blogging.
In March 2009, three Indian Christians were found praying together and arrested by the religious police in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province. The authorities also seized religious material from their apartment. The Christians were released after a few days in prison and instructed not to engage in any further religious activity.
In December 2009, a Filipino national named Norma Caldera returned to her country and described her experiences while in Saudi Arabia as similar to being in a prison. She had worked as a household aide, and said she had been harassed so consistently on the basis of her Christian faith that she was compelled to leave five months ahead of the end of her contract. Caldera said that when she informed her employers that she was a Catholic, the first thing they did was to lower her salary. She was forbidden to leave her place of work and was denied a bed, forced to sleep either on the kitchen floor or in a tent outside the house. She was also forbidden to attend Mass and was forced to fast during Ramadan.
In August 2010, a man claiming to be a leader in Al-Qaeda ordered Muslims in the Saudi military to topple the monarchy for supporting U.S.-led conflicts with fellow Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, and he also called for Christians in Saudi Arabia to be killed. Though no immediate anti-Christian violence ensued, the well-publicized threats generated deep fears among the country’s underground Christian communities.
In September 2010, a Filipino nurse employed at Kharja Hospital in Riyadh, the national capital, died in the hospital after being raped and left dying in the desert by her rapists. Many local Christians suspected she had been attacked because she refused to renounce her Catholic faith. Two weeks later, again in Riyadh, three nurses in the National Guard Hospital were abducted and raped while returning from work and were left in serious condition.
In October 2010, twelve Filipinos and a French Catholic priest were arrested and charged with proselytizing after attending a Mass staged in a hotel in Riyadh. The liturgy, which was attended by approximately 150 Filipinos, had been raided by members of the Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, according to reports from Asia News. The thirteen people arrested were charged with organizing and leading the group. The priest was released when the French embassy in Saudi Arabia provided a legal note called a kafala, a guarantee that an arrested person will appear if and when requested by Saudi authorities. The other Filipino detainees were also eventually released after their embassy provided similar assurances.
In January 2011, two Indian nationals, Yohan Nese, thirty-one, and Vasantha Sekhar Vara, twenty-eight, were arrested by the Muttawa for attending a private prayer service and accused of converting Muslims to Christianity. They later testified that they had been beaten while in prison and subjected to revolting conditions. Sekhar Vara was released in May and Nese in July, and both left the country to return to India. In February 2011, according to Open Doors, an unnamed foreign worker was arrested in Jeddah for discussing his Christian faith with Muslim friends, at their invitation, in the vicinity of a mosque. Initially Saudi authorities threatened him with the death penalty for the crime of attempting to proselytize Muslims, but it was eventually decided to deport the worker back to his home country.
SYRIA
Christians have long been an important minority in Syria, composing roughly 10 percent of the population of 22.5 million. The majority is Greek Orthodox, followed by Catholics, the Assyrian Church of the East, and various kinds of Protestants. Today there’s tremendous fear among Christian leaders that Syria will be the next Iraq, meaning the next Middle Eastern nation where a police state falls and Christians become the primary victims of the ensuing chaos. That prospect is ironic, given that Syria had been seen as a relatively safe haven for Christians and a destination of choice for Iraqi Christian refugees.
Politically, Christians are sometimes seen as sympathetic to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, largely because the Assad family has positioned itself as a bulwark against the spread of Islamic radicalism. They’ve become targets of choice for
Islamist elements in the rebel alliance, who want Syria to be an Islamic state governed by shariah law. Reports from various parts of the country indicate that Christian meeting places have been raided, individual Christians kidnapped and held for ransom, and Christian women raped. Killings of Christians are also on the rise. One news report suggests that fundamentalist taxi drivers have made a vow that they will murder any unveiled female client, meaning women who tend to be Christians.
Yet because Christians are also usually seen as having good ties to the West, they’re also seen with suspicion by some Assad loyalists. In March 2013, former Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini told a Rome conference that he had recently met with a group of young Christian pro-democracy activists from Syria who said they feared militias allied with the Assad regime far more than the rebels.
Compounding their peril, Syria’s Christians are not concentrated in a single defensible enclave. According to a 2012 analysis prepared by the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, the Greek Orthodox, who form the country’s largest Christian community, are concentrated in and around the national capital of Damascus, which means they’re largely located on territory still controlled by Assad’s forces. Syriac Christians are concentrated in a largely autonomous region east of the Euphrates River that is mainly Kurdish, bordering Kurdish-controlled regions in Turkey and Iraq. Catholics and Armenians tend to live in Sunni-dominated middle Syria, including the cities of Aleppo and Homs. It’s an area where the Free Syrian Army is strong, and where the fighting has been the most intense.
The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution Page 16
