With the Islamic State (IS) group routed at last, one of the oldest Christian communities in the Middle East has a chance to reoccupy its ancestral towns.
However, the Chaldean and Syriac people of the Nineveh Plain in Iraq need support to rebuild their homes, and are still anxious that fighting will return.
Bashar Warda, the Chaldean Archbishop of Erbil, hopes that US President Donald Trump’s administration will redirect US aid to his persecuted people.
In an interview in Washington, he said Christians could help quell frontline tensions between Iraqi and Kurdish forces.
US Vice President Mike Pence and US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley have suggested redirecting funds from UN aid agencies to Christian charities.
However, with almost 20,000 Iraqi Christian families — about 100,000 people — driven from their homes, the bishop is calling for urgent action.
“This is a just case,” he told reporters of his people. “They are persecuted, they are marginalized and they are in need.”
Iraqis of all religions, of course, suffered greatly under former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and the conflicts that followed his overthrow in 2003.
However, smaller minorities, like the Christians and their neighbors the Yazidis were targeted by extremists in the latest round of bloodletting.
The IS, the latest incarnation of Sunni Muslim violent extremism, unleashed what US officials have branded a genocidal campaign.
For Warda and his supporters in US-based charity and church movements, it is thus only fair to ask Washington to treat their case differently.
Iraq’s Kurds have an autonomous region and militia that shielded them and the minority refugees they sheltered from the recent violence.
The country’s Arab Shiite majority is the focus of the Baghdad government’s rebuilding efforts and receives aid from nearby Iran.
Even the Sunni Arabs, some of whom fell under the Islamic State’s sway, would be able to count on some support from wealthy Gulf countries.
However, the Christians — and the Yazidis — will be on their own, Warda said, unless foreign donors step up to the plate.
Already, Hungary and Poland have contributed to the cause, and the community now has high hopes that Trump’s administration will help out.
“You are not just helping them because they are Christians, but because they have been persecuted and left behind,” he said.
Warda’s trip to Washington is not just to tout a collection plate: He is to argue that working with his network is a sound investment.
Haley and Pence have made clear that they have concerns about the efficiency of US-led efforts, but the church is hard at work.
About 4,000 families have returned to rebuild the town they call Qaraqosh, Iraq’s largest mainly Christian community, Warda said.
However, smaller villages on what is now the frontline between the forces of the Baghdad government and the Kurdish militia are at greater risk.
One village, where 60 homes had been rebuilt, was abandoned a second time when these forces, once allies against the IS, clashed.
In another, the town of Telekuf-Tesqopa, or Tel Eskof, 900 recently returned families live with their bags packed in case trouble flares again.
However, there again, Warda sees hope that with support, the church — however marginal it is in strategic terms — can help Iraq.
The Baghdad-born cleric is now based in Erbil, capital of the autonomous Kurdish region, and is contact with churchmen in the Iraqi capital, too.
On at least one occasion, when tempers frayed between Baghdad-aligned forces and the Kurdish Peshmerga, Christians have sought to cool tensions.
“So that was because of the church,” he said.
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