Assyrian International News Agency
Threatened, Christians Flee the Mideast
7-18-2007

He refused to leave Baghdad, even after the day last year when masked Sunni
gunmen forced him and eight co-workers to line up against a wall and said,
"Say your prayers." An Assyrian Christian, Rayid Albert closed his eyes and
prayed to Jesus as the killers opened fire. He alone survived, shot seven
times. But a month ago a note was left at his front door, warning, "You have
three choices: change your religion, leave or pay the jeziya"–a tax on
Christians levied by ancient Islamic rulers. It was signed "The Islamic
Emirate of Iraq," a Qaeda pseudonym. That was the day Albert decided to get
out immediately. He and the other 10 members of his household are now living
as refugees in Kurdistan.
Across the lands of the Bible, Christians like Albert and his family are
abandoning their homes. According to the World Council of Churches, the
region’s Christian population has plunged from 12 million to 2 million in
the past 10 years. Lebanon, until recently a majority Christian country–the
only one in the Mideast–has become two-thirds Muslim. The Greek Orthodox
archbishop in Jerusalem, where only 12,000 Christians remain, is pleading
with his followers not to leave. "We have to persevere," says Theodosios
Atallah Hanna. "How can the land of Jesus Christ stay without Christians?"
The proportion of Christians in Bethlehem, once 85 percent, is now 20
percent. Egypt’s Coptic Christians, who trace the roots of their faith back
to Saint Mark’s preaching in the first century, used to account for 10
percent of their country’s population. Now they’ve dwindled to an estimated
6 percent. "The flight of Christians out of these areas is similar to the
hunt for Jews," says Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-Italian author and expert on
Islam, himself a Muslim. "There is no better example of what will happen if
this human tragedy in the Arab-Muslim world is allowed to continue."
Nowhere is the exodus more extreme than in Iraq. Before the war, members of
the Assyrian and Chaldean rites, along with smaller numbers of Armenians and
others, constituted roughly 1.2 million of the country’s 25 million people.
Most sources agree that well over half of those Christians have fled the
country now, and many or most of the rest have been internally displaced,
but some estimates are far more drastic. According to the Roman Catholic
relief organization Caritas, the number of Christians in Iraq had plummeted
to 25,000 by last year. Of the 1.7 million Iraqi refugees in Jordan and
Syria, half are Christians, says Father Raymond Moussalli, a Chaldean vicar
who now says mass every night in a basement in Amman. "The government of
Saddam used to protect us," he says. "Mr. Bush doesn’t protect us. The Shia
don’t protect us. No Christian was persecuted under Saddam for being
Christian."
Over the centuries, the region’s Christians have frequently made common
cause with their Muslim neighbors. Leaders of some Christian factions even
backed Hizbullah during last summer’s Lebanon war, and Arabic-speaking
Christians in the Palestinian territories have regularly sided with the
Muslim majority against the Israeli occupation. Five years ago Palestinian
militants found sanctuary from Israel’s tanks inside Bethlehem’s Church of
the Nativity. Nevertheless, old relationships are crumbling now. When Pope
Benedict XVI quoted a medieval scholar’s critical comments on the Prophet
Muhammad, last September, furious Palestinians reacted by torching at least
half a dozen churches on the West Bank. About 3,000 Christians remain in
Gaza–many of them seeking new homes somewhere else. "We’re living in a
state of anxiety," says Hanady Missak, deputy principal of the Rosary
Sisters School in Gaza City. Militants ransacked the school’s chapel during
the battle between Hamas and Fatah last month. Crosses were broken and
prayer books burned.
At least a few moderate imams are speaking out against attacks on
Christians. "I ask the culprits to return to the Holy Qur’an and reread it,"
said Sheik Muhammed Faieq in a recent sermon at the Mussab Mosque in the
Baghdad suburb of Dora, where jihadists have waged a cleansing campaign
against Christians. "Forcing people to leave their religion or properties is
contradicting Islam’s traditions and instructions." For many in the Middle
East, the admonition comes too late. "There is no future for Christians in
Iraq for the next thousand years," says Rayid Paulus Tuma, a Chaldean
Christian who fled his home in Mosul after two of his brothers were gunned
down gangland style. His pessimism is shared by Srood Mattei, an Assyrian
Christian now in Kurdistan: "We can see the end of the tunnel–and it is
dark."
By Rod Nordland
Newsweek
With Kevin Peraino in Jerusalem, Salih Mehdi in Baghdad, Barbie Nadeau in
Rome and Mandi Fahmy in Alexandria.