No Longer the Iraq I Loved

on January 29, 2015

On December 29, 2014 I took my fourth trip to Kurdistan, Iraq. As I stepped off my 18-hour flight from Los Angles to Erbil, Iraq, a sea of bittersweet emotions rushed over me. Though I knew this trip to the Kurdish region would be different from the previous trips, I was not prepared for the emotional pain and guilt I would experience going back.

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My previous trips to Kurdistan, Iraq had always been prompted by a distinct reason, usually to enhance
my knowledge of Middle Eastern politics and to teach at a university in Duhok. But after living in the Kurdish region for a year and a half, a deep passionate love for this ancient Christian community grew. Now, I returned to face the genocide of the Christians in Iraq I loved and the realization the Iraq I knew no longer exists.

Before arriving in Kurdistan, I expected this region to be the same as when I last visited in October 2013.  I expected a booming economy with tall skyscrapers crowding the capital city of Erbil, the Kurdish capital. I expected the city to come alive at night the way it did when I got off work and wandered through the crowded streets to a cozy café filled with smoked and packed with young men smoIMG_3266king hookah and young women sipping Nescafé. I expected the markets to be swarming with beautiful Kurdish and Assyrian women shopping for spices and meat for that night’s dinner parties. In reality, I expected a Kurdistan that my 26-year self had left two years before. But what I witnessed was deep sadness, fear, and an uncertainty of the future that no international government can seem to dissuade.

Flash-forward to an Iraq now plagued by ISIS. This beautiful region I grew to love for its religious and political tolerance is now at the front of a war against an extremist group that knows no tolerance and humanity. Traveling down the main road of Erbil, the Kurdish, capital, I could only see how the brutal, evil realities of terrorism, down to the abandoned buildings left unfinished, had left a region once flourishing in peace and prosperity in a state of uncertainty. Those same buildings I had just seen a year ago that once reflected a budding economy with new housing, museums, and houses of worship for a happy, free people, reflected a hurting region.

Since July 2014, the ancient Christian community in Iraq, along with other religious minorities, has faced one of the worst religious persecutions in the history of Iraq. After 2,000 years of Christian roots in the region, these ancient Christians and Yezedies have been brutally displaced from their homeland by ISIS. The images of mass exodus that Americans watched on television from the comfort of their own home in the summer of 2014 is nothing compared to the reality before me.

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In Erbil, where 400,000 Christian Internally Displaced Persons (IDP’s) fled to, each had a story of survival and loss. For example, the first Christian camp I visited shelters 360 Christians who fled Mosul and Qaraqosh in 115 degree weather in the middle of July by foot. This journey to reach the Kurdish border took them seven hours. Many of these men, women and children developed life threatening illnesses and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) along the way.

In the second camp I visited shelters 1,690 Christians; many lost family members and children. One particular family had their three-year-old daughter, Christina, ripped away from her mother’s arms by one of the Islamists as they were fleeing in August. To this day, her family is unaware of their daughter’s whereabouts. It was evident in her mother’s eyes that Christina’s kidnapping caused her to lose touch with reality.

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On the same day I heard about Christina’s story, a nine year old Christian girl named Myrna reached up to me and asked me through the interpreter, “why do children from other parts of the world have rights and Iraqi children have none?” As I looked at her, I could not help but feel guilty because deep inside I knew she was right. Why don’t Iraqi children have rights? Why does the world not care enough for them? Why don’t we, as Christians, care enough for them to loudly speak up on their behalf? They are just like you and me. They too were made in Imago Dei, or the image of God.

On New Year’s Eve as my team and I distributed aid to the Christian camps I could see, for the first time in my life, what deep gratefulness looks like in the eyes of a desperate person. In their faces I found a love and joy in the mist of persecution and death. Something I would never expect to never find under such duress.

While in DuhoIMG_3509k, Iraq, the city where I lived for a year, the city where I first discovered my love for the ancient Christians, the city where I learned to deeply love, I now learned new lessons in Iraq. With ISIS only 35 minutes outside of Duhok and hearing hundreds of Yezedies’ stories of brutality, savagery and death, for the first time, I experienced true fear and pain. My heart sank because this was no longer the city I knew; this was no longer the Iraq I loved.

Today’s guest columnist is Jennifer Salcido, co-founder of International Veterans Alliance, an organization seeking to recruit Iraqi war veterans to assist in providing humanitarian aid to persecuted Christians and Yezedies in Norther Iraq and Syria.

 

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