ROME, ITALY – MARCH 05: Pope Francis departs for his vacation to Iraq from Leonardo Da Vinci airport on March 05, 2021 in Rome, Italy. Pope Francis will get started the historic 1st at any time papal take a look at to Iraq. In his initially overseas vacation considering that the begin of the pandemic Pope Francis will stop by Baghdad, Najaf, Erbil and the towns of Qaraqosh and Mosul, which were heavily destroyed by ISIS. Though the excursion is seen as an act of solidarity, the Vatican has been forced to protect the choice to go ahead with the papal pay a visit to amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, as Iraq is currently viewing a spike in infection premiums as it faces a lethal second wave of the virus. (Picture by Franco Origlia/Getty Visuals)
March 5 is a historic day for Iraq and its extensive persecuted Christian local community, which faces an existential crisis because of to ongoing pressures which include political and cultural oppression and ongoing regional violence.
Pope Francis’s apostolic pay a visit to to Iraq started nowadays as he arrived at Baghdad Intercontinental Airport—a transfer long awaited by the region’s Christians, who have been violently qualified for a long time by Islamist terror teams these types of as Al Qaeda and ISIS, as properly as by several past Iraqi governments.
In the course of his take a look at, the pope will meet up with Iraqi President Barham Salih and Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s leading Shiite Muslim cleric, among other authorities. “The Pope will meet with Bishops, Monks, Spiritual, Consecrated Folks, Seminarians and Catechists at the Syro-Catholic Cathedral of Our Woman of Salvation in Baghdad,” Vatican Information noted.
“The visit of His Holiness to Iraq in these complicated conditions is a information that carries hope for the Christian folks in Iraq,” mentioned Sargis Yokhanna, a Baghdad-based mostly Christian Assyrian political activist and minority rights advocate.
“And it is a phase to shift the stagnant water and bring in the attention of the Iraqi govt and the international neighborhood to the Christian men and women in Iraq,” Yokhanna stated. “The Pope will fulfill Christian crowds in church buildings and in lots of places, and he will take a look at Christian villages in the Nineveh Plain. Also, the notion of some fanatical get-togethers to Christians will modify, and there will be a form of quiet and the stress in the area will conclusion since His Holiness the Pope will fulfill with the Muslim religious authorities in Iraq. The Pope’s stop by is a stop by that has a humanitarian character that phone calls for coexistence and reconciliation and carries humanitarian messages. It will be a historic take a look at, and the Iraqi people today are all excited about this pay a visit to.”
“The Cradle of Civilization”
When lots of in the West hear the term “Iraq” right now, they probably believe that it has normally been a greater part-Muslim location. However, Mesopotamia, the spot amongst the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in modern day-working day Iraq, has a millennia-extensive, pre-Islamic history, and is thought of by several historians to be the “cradle of civilization.” It is also the historical land of the indigenous Assyrian people and an immensely significant area for Christianity.
“Baghdad was developed on the internet site of an historical Mesopotamian settlement and noticed a significant scientific contribution from Assyrian and other Christian intellectuals and students,” stated Nicholas Al-Jeloo, a outstanding specialist on the background of Assyrians and the Center East.
Mar Awa Royel, the bishop of California for the Assyrian Church of the East, and the ecumenical officer for the Church, said that “Baghdad is considerable for Christian Iraq, and far more especially for the Assyrian Church of the East, mainly because it was the seat of the catholicos-patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East from circa 780 to 1258, when the Abbasid caliphate ended.”
In the course of his check out, Pope Francis is also because of to keep an interreligious meeting at the ancient Mesopotamian web-site of Ur. Bishop Mar Awa Royel mentioned the area’s theological importance:
“Ur is considered to be the house and put of origin of Abraham, who is our father in faith, and acknowledged as the widespread father of religion for all a few of the significant monotheistic religions,” he claimed. “According to the biblical account of Genesis, Abraham was known as by God out of his father’s property in Mesopotamia—Ur—in get to go to the land which the Lord had promised him. Concerning Christianity, Abraham is the significant progenitor of our Lord Jesus Christ, whose lineage from the Blessed Virgin Mary is traced again to Abraham himself.”
Professor Al-Jeloo pointed out the Assyrian connection with the web page. “The Ur III Dynasty ruled in excess of Assyria in the early time period and the Akkadian language was published working with the cuneiform composing program created there and in other Sumerian towns. As these types of, the ancient Assyrians saw their civilization as a continuation of that of Ur and the Sumerians.”
Continued Christian Persecution
Iraq’s Christians are descendants and carriers of a deeply rooted Christian legacy. However, they have been severely persecuted by each regional governments and many Islamist terror groups.
The modern Iraqi condition was founded in 1932. In August 1933, the Iraqi Military systematically qualified the indigenous Assyrian population in northern Iraq—in a marketing campaign identified as the Simele Massacre—murdering the inhabitants of about a person hundred Assyrian villages across Dohuk and Mosul. At minimum 6,000 innocent Assyrians have been massacred, and tens of 1000’s had to leave their homeland. The Iraqi government has even now not acknowledged this point out-sanctioned massacre.
Simele was not the initial massacre towards the community. As the Holocaust and Genocide Experiments Division of the University of Minnesota notes:
The Assyrians are not strangers to persecution and mass violence, and have previously been the targets of genocide by the Ottoman Empire all through Earth War I, Arabization by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist routine, and Kurdification by Kurds. One particular of the deadliest massacres versus Christians in Iraq transpired in 2010, when Islamic State of Iraq militants raided Our Woman of Salvation Church in Baghdad, opening fireplace on practically 100 worshippers, killing fifty-eight.
The standard Assyrian homeland contains sections of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria. The demographic buildings of the area, however, have significantly been altered considering that the increase of Islam in the seventh century. The biggest assault against the Assyrian people today took place in the course of the 1915-1923 genocide (recognized as “seyfo”, indicating “sword” in Assyrian) by Ottoman Turkey, which is the motive why the Assyrian community in Turkey has pretty much entirely collapsed.
These days, the the vast majority of the Assyrians continue to dwelling in their historic homeland are located in Iraq. But, 91 a long time following the Assyrian genocide by Ottoman Turkey, the Assyrians were uncovered to yet a further genocide in 2014—this time in Iraq and at the arms of the Islamic State, or ISIS.
Assyrian legal rights advocates are hence worried the Assyrian and other Christian populations in Iraq may well go extinct if precautions are not taken by the Iraqi govt and global observers. The inhabitants drop of Christians in Iraq is alarming: Prior to the 2003 US invasion, all over 1.4 million Christians lived in the country. Currently, less than 175,000 remain—an 80 p.c drop in considerably less than two a long time. The Assyrian Confederation of Europe documented in 2018:
Although they have lived in the location for hundreds of years, Iraqi Assyrians have regularly struggled with persecution and violence, in particular for the duration of the 20th century. From horrific functions like the Simile Massacre in 1933 to regular cultural suppression and forced displacement, the local community has endured numerous assaults on its quite existence. In current a long time, some of the worst incidents of cruelty in fashionable history have been perpetrated towards Iraqi Assyrians, particularly in the chaos through the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent increase of Daesh (ISIS) in 2014. As a outcome, more and additional Assyrians have fled from Iraq, fearing for their life and livelihoods.
Susceptible Assyrian communities are more and more marginalized and disenfranchised. They are remaining slowly and gradually smothered by repressive programs. This is remarkably tragic in Iraq, in which Christianity has very long been a essential aspect of Iraqi culture and background and has been practiced by Assyrians for millennia. If Assyrians are to be wiped out in Iraq, it will mean the end of this historical and venerated observe in the state.
Even just after the defeat of ISIS, Christians in Iraq are still uncovered to murderous violence for their faith and ethnicity. On March 8, 2018, for occasion, three associates of an Assyrian Christian family—Dr. Hisham Maskoni, his wife, Dr. Shadha Malik Dano, and her elderly mother—were stabbed to demise in their household in Baghdad. The two health professionals, who experienced remaining Iraq, the region of their delivery, in 2003, returned five yrs ago to operate at St. Raphael Healthcare facility in the cash. The victims, who lived in a neighborhood controlled by a Shiite militia, experienced been tortured, in accordance to Ashur Sargon Eskrya, president of the Assyrian Support Modern society-Iraq.
In accordance to the Open Doors group, which displays Christian persecution throughout the world, Iraq ranks quantity 11 in the World View Record and the persecution degree there is “extreme”:
Soon after decades of violence, an uncertain peace has occur to Iraq—but 2020 noticed recurrent violent protests and the instability in Iraq is a catalyst for the ongoing persecution of Christians.
Christians from a Muslim qualifications often keep their faith a top secret, due to the fact of the strain and threats they are possible to acquire from extended relatives customers, clan leaders and the wider modern society. Christian converts possibility losing inheritance legal rights or the proper to marry—and they are not allowed to marry Christians, as the regulation however considers them Muslim.
Islamic extremists continue to be lively in Iraq, attacking and kidnapping Christians. The government also discriminates versus Christians in different contexts, from the office to test factors. Blasphemy regulations can also be employed against all those who try out to spread the gospel.
A Biblical Land
It is considered that following Israel, Iraq has the most biblical heritage of any other nation in the world.
“The Backyard of Eden is considered to have been in Iraq, via which movement two of the rivers of paradise—the Tigris and Euphrates,” Al-Jeloo mentioned. “Noah is believed to have lived in southern Mesopotamia, considering that his tale is mentioned in the historic Sumerian Gilgamesh Epic, which predates the Bible. Nimrod is intended to have created the Tower of Babel, exactly where God bewildered people’s languages, at Babylon. Abraham came out of Ur. The Assyrians of northern Iraq were being the object of the prophet Jonah’s unwilling mission to save their capital Nineveh from God’s wrath, and their righteousness is anything even described by Jesus in the New Testament.”
Substantially else in the Bible took position in or refers to Iraq, in both of those testaments. Iraq has the tombs of some of the prophets, which includes Ezekiel at al-Kifl, Ezra at al-‘Uzayr, Daniel at Kirkuk, Jonah at Nineveh, and Nahum at Alqosh.
“Psalm 137 and the e book of Daniel are also established there, including the narratives of the youths in the fiery furnace, the lions’ den, Nebuchadnezzar’s madness and the creating on the wall,” Al-Jeloo mentioned. “Nebuchadnezzar’s standard Holofernes, who was beheaded by Judith, was an Assyrian. What’s more, the textbooks of Daniel and Ezra are mostly penned in Aramaic, which was the formal language of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires.”
Al-Jeloo also explained that Assyria is named by the prophet Isaiah as “the rod of God’s anger” and the “work of God’s hands,” and a person of the nations that will be a blessing to the earth in the stop moments, alongside with Israel and Egypt.
“Finally, in the New Testomony, we see that folks from Mesopotamia were being current at the first Pentecost, as narrated in the Functions of the Apostles, and the Apostle Peter wrote his very first letter from Babylon, in which he suggests he proven his decided on Church,” he explained. “No other country in the Middle East, aside from Israel and Egypt, have been so sizeable to the Biblical narrative.”
Iraq’s Varied Christian Populations
Iraq is dwelling to varied ethnic Christian teams these kinds of as Assyrians, Armenians, and Kurdish and Arab converts to Christianity.
“The premier Christian ethnic team in Iraq are the Assyrians (or Assyro-Chaldeans), who belong to a myriad of distinctive apostolic, uniate, and protestant Church buildings which mainly make use of Syriac as a liturgical language,” Al-Jeloo explained. The majority of these discuss Aramaic.
Just after Assyrians, the most significant Iraqi Christian population is the Armenians, who are also divided in between apostolic, uniate, and protestant Church buildings that converse Armenian.
“Currently there is also a rising quantity of Kurdish converts to protestant and charismatic Churches via Western missionary get the job done in northern Iraq,” Al-Jeloo mentioned. “There are also small numbers of Arab converts to Christianity—again mostly to protestant or charismatic Church buildings. There are much less of these, even so, since conversions have not been legally permitted by the central authorities in Baghdad and, generally, this is a little something that is taboo or frowned on in Islam.”
According to Al-Jeloo, there are also Christian expatriates dwelling in Iraq, some of whom have come to be Iraqi citizens.
“These include things like Egyptian Copts, Levantine Christians together with Antiochian Orthodox and Melkite Catholics and those with European descent, who comprise the bulk of Iraq’s Latin Catholics and Anglicans,” he stated.
Meeting with the Prime Shiite Leader
In a region which is still mostly unsafe and unstable for Christians, the impending meeting of Pope Francis and Ali Al-Sistani, Iraq’s major Shiite authority, on March 6 in the province of Najaf is considered by observers to be outstanding. Bishop Mar Awa Royel commented on the importance of the conference:
One particular critical situation that the Pope should really/could deliver up would be the reconciliation among Sunni and Shiite Iraqis, and stop all factionalism and polemics in between them, at least on a practical level if not institutional. The country has been sufferer due to the fact 2003 to the ongoing strife and violence involving these two components of Iraq, and except if there is an agreement to stop all functions of violence between them, the other non-Muslim components of the place (notably the Christians) are unable to truly feel that they are safe and secure in their homeland. The spiritual leaders of the two teams need to have to foster dialogue and a diploma of tolerance for the sake of Iraq’s safety and peace.
Bishop Rovel said he hoped this kind of a dialogue among the main Muslim denominations of Iraq could enable the Iraq’s Muslims superior tolerate the Christians, Yezidis, Shabaks, and other non-Muslim populations. This would involve, he claimed, doing away with militia and paramilitary entities from both sides to reinforce the central federal government.
Bishop Royel stated that the principal responsibility for giving equivalent legal rights and protection for Iraqi Christians and other susceptible communities lies with the Iraqi government, which has but to do ample to assure their protection and livelihood.
“It has been our hope considering the fact that the intervention of the coalition forces in Iraq in 2003 that toppled the previous routine, that Christians and other so-named ‘religious minorities’ would be secured by each the letter of the regulation and almost,” he explained. “The religious and civil rights and liberties of all the parts of Iraq—especially independence of conscience and of religion—need to be additional firmly expressed and enshrined in the Iraqi Structure. The resources of the lawful process must be secular somewhat than religious legal sources, and in this way strongly show that the country is indeed a secular state.”
David Fischler, an American Protestant pastor and and the chairman of the board of administrators of the Iraqi Christian Aid Council (ICRC), reported he “has combined thoughts about the Pope’s stop by to Iraq.” He explained he thinks the pope ought to, regardless of his audience, retain the primacy of Christian reality and the perfectly-becoming of Christians of all denominations in intellect.
“On the a person hand, the Pope occupies the world’s most essential religious place of work, and for that reason has the chance to impact situations for excellent for spiritual minorities in Iraq,” Fischler mentioned. “Certainly, the presence of the world’s most effective-acknowledged Christian in the Muslim-dominated region can serve as an encouragement for those who have endured so a lot for their faith.”
But there is a 2nd hand. Fischler thinks the pope also embodies two worrisome trends from the Vatican in recent a long time.
“First, the willingness to compromise Christian real truth for the sake of superior relations with non-Christians, especially Muslims and 2nd, the unwillingness to communicate out on behalf of those people who are encountering religious persecution in get to defend institutional prerogatives and placate authorities (this has been the scenario in working with the Chinese governing administration for decades)” he explained.
Fischler reported he would like the pope to persuade the Iraqi federal government to honor its pledge to produce an autonomous homeland for spiritual minorities in the Nineveh Basic. He believes it would be a highly effective information that could transfer that work forward if the pope and Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani both equally spoke to that issue.
“I unquestionably hope that the Pope would communicate of the have to have for protection of the legal rights of religious minorities with the governments in both of those Baghdad and Erbil,” he stated.
For Fischler, the papal check out provides an prospect for Christian unity in Iraq, if the pope will satisfy with, along with Chaldean Catholics, leaders of the Assyrian Church of the East, the Syrian Orthodox, and the modest Protestant group.
“If he would encourage them to see them selves not as separate communities, but as 1 Assyrian people today in distinctive church buildings,” he stated, “it would go a approaches toward bringing desired unity to a people today who desperately have to have to unite in the deal with of persecution and oppression.”
Juliana Taimoorazy is the founding president of the Iraqi Christian Aid Council (ICRC).
Uzay Bulut is a Turkish journalist and political analyst formerly dependent in Ankara.
