I have just returned from a week-long fact-finding mission to Mosul and Christian towns in Northern Iraq, to assess the status of U.S.-led reconstruction efforts after the battle to defeat ISIS.
During that time, I met with hundreds of local residents who returned to find their homes burned and looted by ISIS, or bombed into rubble by coalition airstrikes. I met with scores of church leaders and aide groups who are coordinating reconstruction efforts, and with Iraqi and U.S. government officials.
Nineveh was proselytized by St. Thomas in the first century AD. Many of the churches still conduct mass in Aramaic, the language of Jesus. These communities are among the oldest, continuously inhabited Christian centers in the world. As Christians living in the West, this is our homeland, as well. These are our people.
The physical destruction I witnessed can only be called Biblical, with 4th century churches and monasteries in Western Mosul reduced to heaps of rubble and stone. Some of the surrounding Christian villages remain uninhabited to this day. Others are gradually struggling to rebuild.
Fewer than half of the Christian families who lived in the Nineveh Plain surrounding Mosul to the north and east have returned. Many of them live with traumas hard to imagine for ordinary Americans. Some lost children, physically ripped from their arms by barbaric ISIS fighters and sold into sex slavery. Most of them lost their homes, their jobs, and their possessions.
Christians throughout the world should care about their fate, because this is where Christianity began.
82-year old Hannah stayed behind when ISIS swept into Telescof, a Christian village north of Mosul. “I never saw ISIS. I don’t know what is ISIS,” she told us. “I only saw local Arabs, our neighbors.”
Hannah was lucky: the Muslim fighters who seized her village and held it for eight days gave her food and water and let her live. Simply put, she was too old to be sold as a sex slave.
While Telescof changed hands several times between ISIS and the Kurdish peshmerga until it was finally liberated last year, local residents are still hesitant to return even though much of the town has been rebuilt with funds from the Chaldean Church and the Hungarian government.
“More than 1000 families have returned,” says Father Salar Boudagh, the local Chaldean priest. “But most of them came from other places. Of the 1500 Christian families here before ISIS, just 650 have returned.”
The reason? “The Arabs never really left,” says Father Salar. “They just shaved their beards and joined Hasht-e Shabi,” the Iraqi government-backed Muslim militias who roam the area, often terrorizing the population in the name of restoring security.
Christians entering Bartella are met with the black flags of the Shabak militias and a portrait of Ali, the 4th Caliph of Islam revered by Shiites. The Iranian Consul General recently paid a visit to inaugurate a Shiite elementary school. Posters advertizing the school in downtown Bartella bear the photo of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.
“To us, these things are the same as ISIS. They use almost the same black flag,” said Father Behnam Benoka, 39, the Syrian Catholic parish priest.
“The dream of the Shabak is to make Bartella and the Nineveh plain a land for the Shabak. We cannot accept this,” he said.
For two centuries, Shabak primarily lived in villages on the outskirts of the Christian towns. Then in 2003-2004, the U.S. commander for Mosul, Gen. David Petraeus, resettled 2,000 Shabak families from Mosul into Bartella, changing the demography.
Although the town is historically Christian, going back two thousand years, Bartella now has a Shiite mayor, a Shiite town council, and Shiite heads of government services.
And they are exercising that new-found power brazenly. The Shabak militia, Brigade 30 of the Popular Mobilization Forces, stormed a health clinic built and operated by Samaritan’s Purse last year and simply confiscated it. “They took it over! So now it is a base for them,” Father Benoka said.
“I am sounding the alarm,” he warned. “If there is no solution to the Shabak problem, Christians will be gone.”
Reminders of the ISIS occupation can still be seen in bombed out houses, many of them with ISIS members still buried beneath slabs of collapsed concrete inside.
Everyone believes this area is on the verge of a tipping point: a bit more aide, a bit more reconstruction, and more people will come back. But a renewal of jihadi violence – from Shabak militias or ISIS – and they will flee.
In an upcoming report, I will detail the extraordinary efforts by U.S. AID, following the directive of Vice President Mike Pence, to tip the scales in favor of return.