For the past two Christmases, historically Christian neighborhoods and towns in Northern Iraq have passed the holiday without church bells, thanks to ISIS occupation. While this year will be different, those communities are still a long way from fully coming home. One organization is now trying to engage U.S. congregations and parishes to make their return possible.
News broke in October that the military campaign to retake Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, from the grips of ISIS’ occupation was met with hopeful anticipation.
In 2003, Iraq’s Christian population numbered around 1.4 million. Thirteen years later, that number has dwindled to just under an estimated 300,000, with most of it concentrated in lands once held by ISIS. Now, Iraqi Christians who want to return home have been met with post-occupation aftermath that leaves many of them wondering when they’ll be able to start putting the pieces of their lives back together.
The problems for those who are trying to repatriate are “multi-layered,” explains Juliana Taimoorazy, founder and president of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council (ICRC) and senior fellow at the Philos Project.
“First off, it’s cold,” she explained, noting the issues of trying to move populations during northern Iraq’s harsh winters. “Secondly, they’re returning to ground zero. The cities that have been liberated, completely … have been completely devastated.”
Taimoorazy is herself an Assyrian Christian. She was smuggled out of her native Iran into Switzerland in 1989 due to religious persecution from Iran’s Islamist regime. She eventually was granted asylum in Germany a year later before coming to the United States in 2000. Now, she works as an advocate for persecuted Christians in the Middle East with ICRC.
One of the biggest problems in the area has been ISIS’ use of chemical warfare and the lasting effect it has on the area. She notes that in one city alone, 60 percent of the homes have been chemically targeted, while many of the farms in the fertile region along the
Tigris River have also been chemically polluted.
Even worse, in many cases ISIS’ devastation has gone beyond the structural and economic damage done to homes, businesses, churches and farms, to something far more fundamental: the family.
“So many people are returning while their mothers and sisters have been sold into ISIS sex slavery, their fathers have been executed, or their kids are missing, ” Taimoorazy said. “So the family unit has been torn apart. It’s not the same as it used to be in many cases. In many ways, their crisis has just gotten worse.”
“This is where we’ve been asking the international community and the Iraqi government to think seriously about what [the displaced individuals’] return and rebuilding is going to look like,” Taimoorazy said. In response, she’s working through her organization to rebuild things, block by block.
The Iraqi Christian Relief Council began planning Operation Return to Nineveh shortly after the military campaign to reclaim Mosul began, launching it in mid-November. The operation’s mission is to “support the return of thousands of families to their ancestral towns [through] the rebuilding of community centers, schools, homes and churches destroyed by ISIS.”
ICRC’s focus currently is primarily on the town of Teleskof, north of ISIS lines, along with Bartella, Baghdeda (Qaraqosh), Karmlis, and Batanya in the Nineveh Plains region, which has been home to Christians since the first century A.D.
One of the group’s biggest efforts right now is to convince American congregations to adopt and sponsor churches in liberated areas for reconstruction and renewal.
“In a lot of these places, the local church structure is still standing, along with a lot of the homes,” Juliana Taimoorazy explained to CR. “But the things inside have been destroyed, looted, or burned.”
“Right now, the biggest challenge is that people are coming back to ground zero with very few [outsiders] stepping up to help,” she added, stating that the conditions present too big an obstacle for some to return at all.
“For the past two years a lot of the people I talk to say they have been living in limbo. They’ve had dreams of returning, and they haven’t been able to see what’s happened to their homes, their churches, and their community centers,” she said. “Now that they’ve been able to return and assess the damage, they’re completely heartbroken. Reality sinks in.”
While funds have come in from “all over the world,” Taimoorazy said, 95 percent of the money raised so far has come from individual donations in the United States. They’ve gotten sums raging from “$2.50 to thousands of dollars.” (Interested parties can donate to VictimsofISIS.org.)
“We are seeking churches to adopt ‘sister churches’ in the region to help them rebuild,” she said. “For example, we have a proposal from St. George’s Church in Teleskof that tells us how much the floor costs, how much the ceiling costs, the price of windows, and things like that.”
ICRC is also seeking corporate and nonprofit partners in their efforts, which have even earned the endorsement of evangelical author Erwin Lutzer, former senior pastor of the Moody Church in Chicago.
“This is an ongoing project and it’s going to be broken into phases,” said Taimoorazy. “Phase 1: the street, the block, so-and-so has been cleaned. Check mark. Phase 2: the Church rebuilding has begun. Check mark.” And so on.
But these efforts, and others like them, need all the help they can get to succeed. (Or even begin, in many cases.)
“I thank people [in the West] for standing with these [Christian refugees] while they were in displacement for two-and-a-half years,” Taimoorazy said. “But now the work begins. Now they need the church’s help, and American help, and Canadian help, and European help more than ever to help them rebuild their lives.” (For more from the author of “Many Iraqi Christians Won’t Be Home for Christmas. One Group Is Determined to Change That” please click HERE)
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