AINA, CA

Binding Up the Wounds of War

Posted GMT 9-21-2007 17:5:19

SULAYMANIYAH, Iraq — When Yousif Almashmos was born in March 2003,
coalition bombs were falling outside. His family’s Baghdad apartment
swayed as his mother made her way to the hospital. Akram and Sarab
Almashmos lived near headquarters for Saddam Hussein’s security
services, a prominent target for U.S. forces. Worse, Saddam had
positioned rocket launchers between houses in the area, making them a
target for U.S. heat-seekers.

Some neighbors died in those early days of the U.S. invasion, and
when her baby was born, Sarab asked God, "Why are you protecting me?
What is our purpose?" Holding her infant in her arms eight months
later, she told WORLD she read her Bible that night and decided to
name her fourth child Yousif, after the ancient patriarch Joseph,
"because he is not here by accident. God has something for us."

Now Yousif is a rambunctious boy of four with a dark brown cowlick. He
likes to drink other people’s soda when his is gone and he hops around
the room eating off the plates of his older sisters or brother. He
cries when his father refuses to take him on errands. This month he
starts school, having never known a day in his life without war.

Four years ago his parents made friends with U.S. soldiers patrolling
their district, and Sarab said then that she believed they "are coming
to make the area safer, not to fight." But safer was not to be.
Militants repeatedly threatened her husband’s cosmetics business, and
they began to feel that the family was targeted because they are
Chaldean Catholics. Early last year a car bomb exploded on the street
near his business. Then came Aug. 31, 2006.

That day at least three car bombs exploded almost simultaneously in
the district. Within 30 minutes, 64 Iraqis were dead and nearly 300
wounded. The force of the explosions rocketed Almashmos’ shop
assistant 40 feet into the air and completely leveled the store. The
assistant survived but lost one leg.

Two weeks later on Sept. 15, 2006, Akram and Sarab packed their four
children and some clothes into their car and left Baghdad. On Sept. 4,
2007, WORLD caught up with them 200 miles away in Sulaymaniyah, once
an ancient Kurdish capital in northern Iraq, now bulging at an
estimated 1 million residents or more, thanks to the dangers wrought
by Shiite and Sunni militias and terrorists in cities to the
south. Across the region cities and villages are filling with families
like the Almoshmoses–families who are traumatized, dislocated, and
working to reconstruct their lives against an uncertain future.

This month’s report to Congress by the U.S. commander in Iraq,
Gen. David Petraeus, along with a Sept. 13 speech by President Bush,
spelled a shift in strategy–a once open-ended commitment to war in
Iraq now has fixed parameters and a calendar pegging limited troop
withdrawals to measurable success. But for Iraqis the debate is less
political than visceral–less about long-range timetables and overall
strategy and more about daily survival–how to eat, to work, and to
protect one’s family. Approaching the war’s five-year mark, how does a
prostrate nation bind up the wounds of war?

For Iraq’s religious minorities the question is particularly vital, as
those groups have been targeted by terrorists and have the most to
fear from an Iraq hijacked by Islamic militants. The annual growth
rate among Christians in Iraq has dropped from approximately 3 percent
in 1950 to -1 percent today.

For Akram and Sarab, answering that question meant coming north, even
if it meant leaving everything behind, including Sarab’s ailing
mother. Sulaymaniyah in the last 18 months has become home to
thousands of displaced people like them, religious minorities who face
threats from Islamic extremists. Across the three northern provinces
known as Kurdistan, an estimated 30,000-50,000 Christians are taking
refuge. In contrast to some reports in the United States, they say
they are finding a haven not only from violence but from
persecution. This month Kurdish officials gave a tentative go-ahead
for a new evangelical church in Sulaymaniyah to serve the displaced
from Baghdad, according to pastor Ghassan Thomas, and the government
currently is backing the construction of more than 40 churches in the
region.

Sulaymaniyah is home to Iraq’s current president, Jalal Talabani, and
sits among high desert hills at about 2,500 feet above sea level. It
once boasted having Tucson as its sister city. Now it boasts
overcrowded streets, construction cranes across the skyline, and a
multi-ethnic, multi-religious revival in what until the war was
largely a Kurdish enclave. The north has a tax- and duty-free policy
on investments–prompting business interests driven out of Baghdad, as
well as Turkish and Asian interests, to buy into development here.

At lunch in a restaurant with Akram and Sarab, a traditionally dressed
Kurdish family sits to their right, while to their left sits a
Western-dressed local government official talking business with
Japanese investors. In the streets burqa-clad women brush shoulders
with women in short skirts and heels, while men are apparently too
busy hustling everything from pomegranates to refrigerators to notice
the changes.

Landing here for the Almoshmos family has been easier than for many
displaced. Thanks to a Kurdish business associate in Baghdad, Akram
found a job as a local television set distributor. He is able to
employ his now-handicapped former shop assistant. Sarab works for the
Kurdish Heritage Institute. The Chaldean church here helped the family
find a one-bedroom flat (for the family of six) and they live with
borrowed furniture. Through the church they’ve encountered dozens of
families without work or decent housing and are helping to assist them
with monthly food baskets. But on Sept. 6, Sarab learned from a
Baghdad neighbor that her mother had died, alone and separated by the
violence.

City life for some is not solace enough. The village of Bereka is
nearly as far from Baghdad as you can get without leaving Iraq–350
miles away from the capital high in the mountains near the Turkish
border. And that’s how far away Bihnan Rehana wants to be. Rehana was
a resident of Baghdad’s Dora district, historically a mostly Christian
neighborhood, until terrorist groups emptied it door-to-door over the
last 12 months. Earlier this year terrorists firebombed the Assyrian
St. George’s Church and removed its cross.

Rehana lived in Dora since 1975. He ran a street market, a good
business that allowed him to support his wife and five children and to
afford one of the district’s larger houses. Then threats began: "I was
approached by terrorist groups and asked how many children I had. When
I told them five, they said, ‘Fine, three for you and two for us.’
They wanted us to pay $10,000 a month as a kind of tax for staying in
Dora, or they would take my children."

Such threats follow a pattern described by many displaced Christians
whom WORLD visited across five northern provinces. Usually
black-masked militants threaten residents face-to-face or issue
letters by night demanding that they convert to Islam, pay an
exorbitant fee, or be killed. "To be safe, be Muslim," is their
slogan.

One day the insurgents shot at Rehana’s car to show him they were
serious. Today he keeps the pockmarked sedan parked outside his new
home in Bereka, the village of his forefathers. When he left Baghdad,
he said, he left everything except the car and the clothes on his
back. His youngest children are with relatives in Syria. His oldest
son remains in Baghdad.

Rehana knows many Christians who have fled to neighboring Jordan and
Syria. But like many WORLD spoke to, he believes that Baghdad one day
will be livable again, and that the better choice is to stay. Judging
by the four cities, two smaller towns, and eight villages WORLD
visited across five northern Iraq provinces, he may be right. From the
remote and mountainous border in the north to the hazy, hot, and
brittle pastureland of Nineveh Plain, it’s possible for an American to
travel without personal protection, a government minder, or
U.S. military escort, without a ceramic-plated vest or a
headscarf. Christians and religious minorities in particular say they
are welcomed at northern checkpoints, though Kurdish forces are
notoriously hard on outsiders and reject most cars with Baghdad
license plates.

Surprisingly, Kurdish officials in the north–underwritten by oil
revenues and U.S. reconstruction aid–are taking the first steps to
rebuild dozens of Assyrian Christian and Chaldean villages. Kurdish
regional government (KRG) minister of finance Sarkis Aghajan Mamendu
has made it a priority to fund housing and schools in these villages
even ahead of Kurdish Muslim villages that were destroyed under Saddam
Hussein.

In Bereka the KRG has built 25 concrete slab homes for 25 families
from Baghdad. It also constructed a school and a church. In the far
northern district of Dohuk, the Kurdish regional government has built
1,400 houses, 12 schools, and 13 churches in the last 18
months. (That’s right, a majority Muslim government is building
churches for displaced Christians.)

The evidence contrasts with recent reports, including a 2007 report
filed by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom
(USCIRF), claiming Kurdish treatment of Assyrians in northern Iraq
includes "religiously motivated discrimination," confiscation of
property, and denial of "key social benefits, including employment and
housing."

Emanuel Youkhana, an Assyrian priest and director of the Iraqi-German
humanitarian aid organization CAPNI, called the report "totally
misinformed." Youkhana, whose group runs a mobile medical clinic and
other projects in villages across the region, told WORLD, "This is not
paradise, but in this part of the world it’s very easy to get enemies
when what we need are friends. Iraqi Kurdistan is proving it can be a
model for religious freedom starting in Iraq, and it needs to be
supported."

USCIRF communications director Judith Ingram acknowledged, "We do know
there is some dispute over these reports," and the commission held
another set of hearings Sept. 19 on Iraq.

Area pastors also dispute the wisdom of creating a Christian enclave
to protect minorities in the region. Pastor Yussuf Matty believes it
would simply make Christians a bigger target for militant
Islamists. And he has been successful in registering three schools in
cities in the north that operate as Christian schools with student
bodies–now numbering over 1,000–made up largely of Muslims. "What we
tell the Kurdish officials is we want to work hand in hand with
Kurdish Muslims, we want to live with you but not at the edge of
life. We want to be at the heart of Kurdistan, and we want to work
hard for the good of the community."

The USCIRF report also cites discrimination against Christians and
land disputes in Nineveh Plain. But in En Baqr the government has
built 31 new houses for displaced Chaldean families from Mosul and
Baghdad. In Karanjo, CAPNI is finishing a church and rows of new
houses are going up.

Nineveh Plain falls within Baghdad’s administrative zone, and while it
includes Kurdish, Armenian, Yezedi, and historic Christian villages,
it has not seen the same level of progress as Kurdish-administrated
villages further north. Problems and need remain for the estimated
4,500 displaced families there (one in four families of the total
population).

In Germawa, former Baghdad resident Boutros Simon said three families
are living in his new two-bedroom house because there is not enough
housing in the village. Some of the new houses lack water and
electricity. The 22 children in the village go to school in Al Kush,
about 15 miles away. While there is farming in the area, most of the
newly displaced don’t have jobs. Simon receives about $100 a month in
government stipend, like other displaced families who register with
the government–not enough to support everyone under his roof. At
current prices, a tank of gas in northern Iraq can cost nearly $100.

Simon said it will take years to sort out land claims all over the
north, given Saddam Hussein’s repeated purges of minority
communities. He denied reports in the United States of land disputes
locking out the Assyrian Christians who return to Nineveh Plain:
"Village councils can present their cases to the government, and we
are working to provide housing for everyone who comes here."

When Rehana returned to Bereka he found his family’s land farmed by a
Kurd under a 10-year lease with the local governorate. Without going
to court, he and other returnees worked out an arrangement allowing
the Kurd to complete the two years remaining on his lease before
turning the land over to the Assyrian returnees.

Simon believes the economic picture will improve in Nineveh province
if the area were to come under KRG control. That could happen if a
referendum extending the Kurdish autonomous region as far south as
Mosul and Kirkuk, encompassing Nineveh Plain, takes place. Under
Iraq’s new constitution, the referendum is to be scheduled before the
end of 2007. But due to violence in Mosul and Kirkuk, and the debate
over allocating oil revenues from the area, it’s likely to be
postponed. In the meantime, Simon–speaking for a surprising number of
the displaced–says he longs for the day when it’s safe enough to
return to Baghdad.

By Mindy Belz