Ten years ago, in the days following August 6-7, 2014, the city of Erbil in northern Iraq became one of the largest concentrations of internally displaced people on Earth. Driven eastward across the Nineveh Plain by ISIS terror, nearly one million Iraqis of all faiths found themselves fleeing for their lives through the blazing heat of the Iraqi summer.
Included among the violently displaced that summer were nearly 150,000 Iraqi Christians from some of the world’s most ancient Christian communities. Many of them ended up in the diocese where I am pastor.
I wish I could tell you that, after the subdual of ISIS in Iraq five years ago, the nation’s Christian community is now in full recovery with a peaceful and prosperous future on the horizon. But the truth is something quite different.
We Christians are today the collateral damage of a foreign-policy venture from abroad that began in 2003 and continued through a premature and politically driven withdrawal of U.S.-led coalition forces in 2011. Along with our brothers and sisters from other faiths, we saw our country invaded, ripped apart and then left open to the horror of ISIS.
Now largely abandoned as a hollow shell, no longer a country in any meaningful sense, Iraq is merely a place on the map where foreign powers fight out their designs through proxies. In this debris of a civilization, the Christians of Iraq are on the verge of disappearing from history.
Optimistically, the remaining Christian population is considered to be fewer than 250,000, down from as many as 1.3 million before 2003. Realistically, the Christian population is likely far lower than 250,000, and our future daily becomes closer to that of a museum people, dwindling caretakers of what remains of our ancient towns and sacred places.
None of this is for lack of trying. We have sought with often-heroic efforts to build schools, hospitals and even a new university, providing the kinds of service to all that have marked the best tradition of the Catholic Church throughout history. Wherever possible we have sought help from the West and in many instances have been blessed to receive timely support, which has allowed us to hold on for another month, another year.
And yet, in the miserable dysfunction of Iraq today, we are disappearing. Deeply ingrained, religiously motivated persecution against our people continues at the everyday level despite the stated concerns of leaders. Our once-thriving entrepreneur class finds its businesses extorted and its profits stolen. Our diligently crafted proposals for international assistance to our hospitals and schools are now routinely set aside, not because of failures at these institutions, but simply because the eyes of the world have moved on. We find ourselves increasingly in the world’s rearview mirror, and quite soon we will be out of sight — permanently.
And while there are others in Iraq who are numerically “minorities,” none of them — except our friends the Yazidis, who have suffered these past years along with us — are in any danger of becoming extinct. Still, with meaningful, sustained solidarity and support, there is time to change this course.
In March 2021, Pope Francis made his historic visit to Iraq, a visit that concluded in Erbil with one of the most memorable papal Masses in modern times. This visit showed to the world and to Iraq itself that a different kind of Iraq was still possible and that the historic Christian culture of Mesopotamia still had a critical place in it.
But the optimism that followed the papal visit drifts now into the distance. Our national government remains fractured, and the necessary protections for our deeply endangered Christian people and culture are nonexistent. From the perspective of the Church, we see that despite a proven and superior track record of effectively managing and implementing aid funding over the past 10 years, serious and professional proposals from our entities are routinely passed over by the donor community.
Still, here in what remains of Christian Iraq, we persevere and hope. We are striving to bring along a new generation of leadership, fully inclusive of the role of women and supportive of the courageous young people who still, in faith, remain. We are working tirelessly to establish anchor institutions in the fields of education and health care that benefit all Iraqis and show to them and the world our witness to Christian service. And we accept that within our own ranks, there is a great need for improvement and growth; we struggle for the way forward in this, as do countries and peoples everywhere.
And yet I ask, does not there still exist a moral responsibility outside Iraq to understand that this small community of Christians, among the very first Christians in history, is now on the verge of disappearing for reasons and causes not of their own making, but from decisions made far away by people and governments who have since moved on?
We Christians of Iraq are still here. We pray that all those leaving us behind may yet turn their heads and see us while there is still time.
