For the first time in four years the Christians of Iraq will celebrate Christmas in the Nineveh Plains, their ancestral homelands which were first evangelised by the Apostles in the years after the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Yet sadly bells will not be ringing for Midnight Mass in Mosul, a city that was the largest Christian conurbation in the region until it was overrun by ISIS terrorists in June 2014. Even with ISIS gone, it is simply too dangerous for Christians to return home.
“There are no Christians in Mosul and there is no intention to go back,” says Stephen Rasche, a Catholic lawyer from Boston who serves as director of resettlement programmes for the Chaldean Archdiocese of Erbil. “Right now, the Church has no plans to restore any of the Church properties in Mosul because we won’t put priests there, we don’t have people there. We just don’t think it is safe for Christians.”
The city, Rasche explains, remains in the hands of people who sympathised with ISIS.
“A lot of people who stayed in Mosul stayed there because they chose to stay, and they chose to live under that regime because it was a thing that they supported,” he says.
“They clearly had a rude awakening, but still the mentality of the people who stayed there is very much that Christians are not even second-class citizens, but third or perhaps fourth class.”
Similarly, the 25,000 Christians who once lived in the town of Tall Kayf, eight miles north of Mosul, are too scared to return, having experienced their resident Sunni Arab neighbours turn against them by, for instance, pointing out Christian homes to the invaders as well as ordering the inhabitants to leave.
Most of the Christians are in fact returning to only a very small number of villages – about two in Kurdish territory and four in Iraq, including Qaraqosh, once again home to 4,000 families. And it is a miracle that they are there at all.
This is because not a penny of funding channelled through the United Nations development programme is being received by these Christian communities to rebuild their settlements. Nor does the UN have any strategy whatsoever to enable the return of displaced Christians to their homelands.
“The Christians do not exist on any radar screen that the UN has,” says Rasche. “They just don’t exist. The only group they exist for is the Church.”
The irony of this is that millions of aid dollars are being spent by the UN on rebuilding towns and villages for persecuted minority communities precisely where they have been religiously cleansed of all Christians (an objective of ISIS that has been richly fulfilled). This means that those who are benefiting from this international endeavour are the same people who sided with the terrorists.
Some 900 Christian families were able to return to Teleskov only because the Hungarian government bypassed the UN to hand a grant of £1.7 million directly to the Church, which used the money to recover the town.
This was an act of practical kindness and wisdom which was greeted with opprobrium by other Western politicians who, along with acquiescent media, tend to scorn Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán as a right-wing maverick in the mould of Donald Trump.
But it is only Hungarian cash and grants from such organisations such as Aid to the Church in Need and the Knights of Columbus that so far have made it possible for Christians to return to the Nineveh Plains. Otherwise, Christianity would teeter ever closer to extinction in Iraq as the West wrings its hands over causes it feels to be far worthier, such as the plight of the Rohingya Muslims in Burma, leaving the Christians of Iraq to wonder what has gone wrong.
It could be that the mechanisms for the delivery of aid are ineffective, especially where corruption is rife, but there is also a suspicion that the secular West, with its dislike for Christianity, simply doesn’t care that much.
Yet some politicians are starting to heed their concerns, with Mike Pence, the American vice president, declaring in October that US aid for persecuted Christians would be diverted from the UN agencies to Christian charities.
“We will no longer rely on the United Nations alone to assist persecuted Christians and minorities in the wake of genocide and the atrocities of terrorist groups,” he said. “The United States will work hand in hand from this day forward with faith-based groups and private organisations to help those who are persecuted for their faith. This is the moment, now is the time, and America will support these people in their hour of need.”
British government ministers, in contrast, have appeared paralysed by a preoccupation with process and by an unyielding faith in “trusted partners and NGOs”, rather than looking clinically at the outcomes.
The European Union is worse still; it appears not to be listening at all, with the exceptions of the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia.
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The result of all this is that the Christians of Iraq sense they have been abandoned by the liberal elites of the West. It is little wonder that they were cheering for Donald Trump during the US presidential election.
“They feel that in US policy during the Obama years the Christians were not any sort of a priority, and they felt that,” says Rasche. “Initially, there was hope that Trump was taking a different approach. There were words from the administration that gave them hope and that is why the Christians inside Iraq supported his candidacy.”
America also recognises the plight of the Christians of Iraq as genocide. Surely it is right in this respect as the number of Christians has plunged from 1.5 million to just 250,000 in the last 14 years and they are now, after 2,000 years, in serious danger of disappearing altogether.
Fr Salar Kajo, a Chaldean Catholic priest helping to resettle refugees in Teleskov, says that Christians of the region have entered a critical period.
“It is the time to be or not to be,” says Fr Kajo, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Alqosh. “It is the last chance for us.”
Until just a few weeks ago, it was uncertain whether Christmas would be celebrated in the town of Teleskov at all, as the newly relocated families fled once again, this time from the threat of a clash between Iraqi forces and Kurdish Peshmerga nationalists.
Fr Kajo was one of 10 Christians to remain in the town until the crisis was diffused by US intervention. Now he and the Christian families are preparing for a joyful Christmas, which will involve the children performing a Nativity ahead of a three-hour Midnight Mass and celebrations into the Christmas night and early morning.
But their situation is so precarious, admits Fr Kajo, that some of them may well be partying with their bags packed.
“All of the Christians of Iraq dream that one day our families and friends can come back and start our relationships over again, but right now we can’t advise them to come. We don’t have a stable situation to tell them to come back to,” he says.
Those brave enough to have returned will form a beautiful spectacle on Christmas Eve as they walk to church in a candlelit procession. The candles will be deposited along the roadsides to symbolise the birth of Jesus, the Light of the World.
In Iraq, this is a light flickering in an all-encompassing darkness. It would be a tragedy if the flame was to blow out altogether, and perhaps a sin for us to stand idly by and watch as it is extinguished.
Simon Caldwell is a freelance journalist
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