Iraqi Christians have long prided themselves on being the indigenous people of Mesopotamia, but now they are fleeing the country, writes Salah Nasrawi

Ravaged by sectarian violence and persecution, Iraq’s Christians continue to flee into exile, prompting fears that this community, one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world, could be facing extinction in its ancient homeland.

Religious and political leaders are blaming Western countries for encouraging the Iraqi Christians to emigrate, triggering old accusations that Western nations are plotting to displace the Christians from their Middle Eastern homelands.

The number of Christians in Iraq has declined by nearly half since the US-led invasion of the country in 2003, according to various estimates, because of political upheaval, attacks, the forced expulsion of the Christians from their home areas and a lack of jobs and economic opportunities.

According to Christian officials, some 61 churches have been attacked in the decade since the US-led invasion of Iraq, with more than 1,000 Christians killed in the violence though not all of them in explicitly targeted attacks.

Nearly half a million Iraqis have died from war-related causes in Iraq since the US-led invasion, according to a study by the British-based group Iraq Body Count that was published last month.

The flow of Iraqi Christians out of the country spiked in 2010 after the Al-Qaeda terror group attacked a church in Baghdad in October of that year. This was the single worst attack on Iraq’s Christians since the US occupation, and it was one that left 50 worshippers and two priests dead.

While many Christians have fled to neighbouring Jordan, Syria and Turkey, others have sought refuge in countries as far as away as Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the United States. Some have moved to Christian safe havens in the Kurdish-controlled areas and cities of Iraq.

Life for Iraq’s remaining Christian population remains extremely difficult. Those who stay in areas under the Baghdad government’s control live in fear of violence, and they are subject to routine intimidation. Unemployment is high among Christians, and some of their businesses, including liquor stores, are often bombed by vigilantes belonging to Islamist fundamentalist groups.

Even those who have fled to Iraq’s Kurdish-controlled north are not better off. Though relatively safe from the bloodshed caused by the nearly daily bombings and sectarian tension in the rest of the country, they face different kinds of threat, such as the seizure of their land and ethnic discrimination.

Most Christians in Kurdistan live in community enclaves in order to feel more secure, and this week political and human-rights activists met in Erbil, the Kurdistan Regional capital, to probe means of combating what they called demographic changes in areas inhabited by Christians in northern Iraq, including those under Kurdish control.

While the consequences of the Christians’ flight may be readily understood, the underlying causes remain unaddressed. Many Iraqis claim that the Christians are not being singled out by mainstream Muslims, but that they have been victims of the nation’s ethno-sectarian divide and violence by extremist groups, such as Al-Qaeda.

They argue that the Christians will be better off if Iraq’s feuding Muslim communities resolve their disputes and forge an all-inclusive political system that also includes minorities such as Christians.

Even many Iraqi Christian activists believe that the flow will stop if the government is able to guarantee security to protect the Christians, stop the land seizures, and moderate demographic changes in Christian-dominated areas and provide Christians with jobs.

Some Iraqi Christians have called for a separate Christian “federal entity” in the north of the country that they hope could guarantee them more autonomy and a better political status.

Iraqi political and Muslim leaders have been outspoken against the violence targeting Christians, while the majority of Iraqis are critical of the abuses. This week, the Shia imam of Friday prayers in the city of Najaf, Sadreddin Al-Qubanchi, pleaded with the country’s Christians not to leave Iraq.

“Iraq is a country for all its sons, and it should not see them emigrate,” he said.

The fear of a total exodus, however, has prompted Church leaders and Christian politicians to appeal for greater efforts to be made to tackle factors that could fuel this flight, including facilities to ease the Iraqi Christians’ migration.

Last week, Pope Francis, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, summoned several leaders of Middle Eastern churches to Rome in order to discuss the plight of Christians in Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries and to urge them to stay.

The gathering followed a private meeting with 10 heads of Middle Eastern churches on the situation of Christians in Iraq and other parts of the region.

Pope Francis said that the Roman Catholic Church “would not accept” a Middle East without Christians, “who often find themselves forced to flee areas of conflict and unrest in the region”.

Before the meeting some top Catholic bishops had urged action to be taken on what they termed as “the phenomena” of the current migration and the tendencies of some foreign embassies to facilitate the granting of asylum visas for Iraqi Christians.

Iraq’s Chaldean Catholic patriarch, Louis Raphaël I Sako, had requested that this issue be discussed with the heads of the Christian churches and for “practical measures” to be taken to deal with an issue that “threatened the existence” of Iraq’s Christians. 

He had earlier criticised Western embassies for offering visas to the rapidly shrinking minority in Iraq.

“It is unfortunate that some embassies are facilitating the migration of Christians, which impoverishes the country of their skills and weakens their brothers who want to stay,” he told a UN-sponsored conference in Baghdad recently.

Gregory Laham, the Syrian patriarch of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, has also urged European countries not to “encourage Syrian Christians to emigrate” from his country.

Iraqi Christian politicians have voiced similar concerns. On Saturday, Emad Youkhana, an Iraqi Christian lawmaker, urged foreign embassies and international organisations to “stop helping Christians to emigrate” from Iraq.

After the bishops’ meeting in Rome a statement said Pope Francis was concerned by “the situation of Christians, who suffer in a particularly severe way the consequences of tensions and conflicts in many parts of the Middle East”.

“We will not resign ourselves to imagining a Middle East without Christians,” he said.

Pope Francis has himself been criticised for encouraging emigration, however, after he called in July for “greater compassion” for migrants who make the hazardous crossing across the Mediterranean to southern Europe.

The majority of the Iraqi Christians belong to the ancient Eastern churches whose followers are almost all ethnic Assyrians and Chaldeans. Other denominations include Syriac Orthodox, Armenians and Protestants.

The emigration of Christians from Iraq began in the aftermath of World War I, and it has greatly picked up over the last decade. There were about 1.5 million Christians in Iraq before the 2003 US-led invasion, but now there are about 500,000, according to various assessments.

The roots of the Christian emigration problem in Iraq’s modern history date back to British colonial rule after World War I. On Iraqi independence, the Assyrians, many of them employed in the military under British command, rebelled against the new government, refused to accept its citizenship, and demanded to be given autonomy within Iraq.

The bloody crash of the insurgency led by the Iraqi army in 1933 led many Christians to leave Iraq. Wars, political disturbances and hardships since then have continued to drive Christians either to migrate or to become displaced inside Iraq.

While it remains imperative for the world to be concerned about the status of the Iraqi Christians, their plight should be understood within the context of the political instability the country has been going through since the US-led invasion a decade ago.

Like the rest of the Iraqis, the country’s Christians have fallen victim to the systematic destruction of the Iraqi state and society, which has unleashed an ethno-sectarian struggle over power and wealth and rekindled historical and religious rivalries.

In his elaborate speech to the Baghdad conference, Sako was right when he underlined the deteriorating security situation in the country and “the spread of a culture of majority and minority” as being key causes behind the Christians’ migration.

“Effective forces on the ground have surfaced to use this reality to promote divisions on a sectarian basis, and it seems that the regional and international powers are pushing hard to keep the situation miserable in the region,” he said.

Turkey has been walking a tightrope on Iraq, from which it might now be set to fall, writesSalah Nasrawi

When Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu visited Iraq last week, he took time out to join millions of Shias paying homage at the Shia holy shrines in Najaf and Karbala on Ashura, the most sacred day of the Shia calendar which marks the martyrdom of the Prophet Mohamed’s grandson Imam Hussein by the Umayyad caliph Yazid in 680 CE.

Back home in Istanbul, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan also attended two Ashura day ceremonies, emphasising in his speeches that Imam Hussein’s “sacrifice is a source of unification and brotherhood” among Muslims “rather than of separation”.

However, Davutoglu and Erdogan’s symbolic gestures towards Iraq’s Shias, which come as Ankara is trying to break the ice with the Shia-led government in Baghdad after a three-year lull, seemed to be more an exercise in political dancing or tightrope walking than a solid diplomatic initiative.

For Turkish diplomacy to be able to mend fences with Baghdad, it needs to be doing more than just avoiding disagreement by saying what Davutoglu and Erdogan think their Shia interlocutors want to hear. This gets them into trouble when the Shias realise that Ankara is courting them while having its eyes firmly fixed on the country’s Kurds and Sunni Arabs.

Ankara’s relations with Baghdad deteriorated following a series of crises after the Shia-led government accused Turkey of interfering in Iraq’s internal affairs and fuelling its ethnic and sectarian conflicts.

Tensions rose after Davutoglu and Erdogan sponsored the mostly Sunni-dominated Iraqiya bloc in Iraq’s elections in 2010, hoping it would replace the Shia alliance that had controlled the Iraqi government since the collapse of the regime led by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in 2003. The Shias at that time had accused Ankara of trying to bring the Sunnis back to power.

Relations took another dive after Ankara started building strategic relations with the Kurdish regional government in Iraq, including by allowing the Kurds to export oil through Turkey. The state-backed Turkish Energy Company (TEC) was established to operate in Kurdistan, eyeing joint exploration on more than a dozen oil and gas fields in the semi-autonomous region.

Iraq’s central government also protested against Turkey’s decision to give refuge to fugitive Iraqi Sunni Vice President Tarek Al-Hashemi, who has been sentenced to death in absentia on charges of terrorism.

An unauthorised visit by Davutoglu to the disputed city of Kirkuk in August 2012 also triggered a backlash when Baghdad accused Turkey of defying its sovereignty and backing Kurdish claims to the oil-rich province.  

In addition, the war in Syria, which borders both Iraq and Turkey, has been a source of contention as Ankara has supported the Syrian rebels in their drive to oust the regime led by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, while the Shia-led government in Baghdad has argued that the rising violence in Iraq has been caused by the civil war in Syria that has strengthened the Sunni insurgency and the Al-Qaeda-aligned groups there.

These disputes have embroiled Baghdad and Ankara in a tug-of-war and accusations by the Iraqi Shias of neo-Ottomanism, or attempts by Turkey to promote a greater role for Ankara in the Middle East, including in Iraq which was formerly part of the Ottoman Empire.

But in recent weeks, Turkey has seemed to have been reconsidering part of its regional strategy, especially its approach to Syria, presumably arising from the stalemate in Syria’s civil war and the deadlock in its peace efforts with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Turkey now seems to feel threatened by the rise of Islamist extremist groups, such as Al-Qaeda in Syria, and the resurgence of a Kurdish autonomous entity led by PKK allies on its southern borders.

While for understandable reasons Ankara needs to advance its political and economic ties with the Kurds in Iraq in order to balance those with its sceptical, or even negative, perceptions of the PKK, it has moved fast to build on the Baghdad government’s concern about Al-Qaeda to improve the two countries’ strained relations.

During his visit to Baghdad, Davutoglu pledged to end the diplomatic tensions plaguing the two neighbours. He told his Iraqi hosts at a press conference that “the historical friendship between Turkey and Iraq is as inseparable as ever”.

On Friday, Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yildiz proposed that Ankara be the broker in trying to find a solution to an oil dispute between the Baghdad government and the Kurdistan Region. He suggested that Ankara serve as an independent intermediary by having Iraqi oil revenues deposited into an escrow account at a Turkish state bank.

However, it does not take much to realise that the real objectives behind the Turkish moves have not been so much to cement ties with the Shia-led government as to lure the Iraqi Kurds towards Erdogan’s agenda.

On Saturday, the president of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, Masoud Barzani, visited south-eastern Turkey in a historic trip meant to shore up support for the flagging Kurdish peace agreement and bolster Turkey’s influence across its troubled southern borders.

The peace process has stalled since a truce in March, with the PKK saying a package of democratic reforms declared by the Erdogan government last month to reinforce the rights of the Kurdish minority had fallen short of its expectations.

In an unusual scene, the government allowed thousands of Kurds to greet Barzani in Diyarbakir, the main city in Turkey’s Kurdish region, in a rally that was attended by Erdogan, who billed the visit as “a historic process”.

Observers have been asking how significant all of this is to Erdogan, whose ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) faces crucial elections next year. According to Turkish commentators, Erdogan’s invitation to Barzani serves several political purposes.

First, Erdogan hopes to weaken Kurdish leader Abdallah Ocalan by reminding him that Barzani, who has no love for the imprisoned PKK leader, is a key actor in Kurdish politics. He hopes that by stirring up inter-Kurdish competition he will be able to push Ocalan and his supporters into taking a more conciliatory position on the peace process.

Second, Erdogan is keen to press the peace process in the run-up to the municipal elections next March, with the ruling AKP looking to tempt the Turkish Kurds away from the PKK supporters who govern some Kurdish cities, including Diyarbakir.

Third, Erdogan hopes that Barzani will denounce the transitional administration that the Kurds in Syria declared last week, despite Turkey’s objections, for fear that the enclave will fall under the control of pro-PKK local parties.

“In a way Erdogan is trying to hit several birds with one Barzani stone in this move,” wrote Turkish commentator Murat Yetkin in the Hurriyat newspaper on Sunday.

If this was Erdogan intention, then at first glance he has certainly succeeded in driving a wedge between Iraq’s Kurds and their brethren in Syria and Turkey.

However, it is unlikely that Erdogan and Davutoglu’s Ashura gestures will achieve anything meaningful to the Iraqi Shias or alleviate their concerns about what they perceive as Ankara’s game-playing in Iraq’s internal affairs.  

Erdogan government’s proposal to try to broker a solution to the oil dispute between the Kurdistan regional government and the government in Baghdad has fallen on deaf ears in the latter.

The Iraqi government, which deems the exploration and production of oil by the Kurdish administration as illegal, has repeatedly said it is opposed to any direct or unauthorised exports through Turkey.

Iraq’s Shia-controlled government also expects Turkey to show signs that it does not support Sunni extremists working to topple the government. It also expects Ankara to hand over Al-Hashemi, in line with an Interpol arrest warrant.

 Quite how the Shias reacted to Ankara’s attempt at rapprochement has been evident in their religious leaders’ response to Davutoglu’s pilgrimage to the two holy cities.

One of the Shias’ most important demands from Turkey came from an unexpected source. The Turkish media reported that Shia spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani protested to Davutoglu when he received him about Turkey’s construction of major dams on the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers that are reducing water flows into Iraq.

According to these reports, Al-Sistani dismissed Davutoglu’s explanation about Turkey’s water policies vis-à-vis neighbouring countries and suggested that the water problem should be resolved by UN arbitration.

A prominent Shia preacher in Karbala was even less diplomatic.

“The Ottomans were the Yazids who used to kill the Shias,” he told his congregation outside Hussein’s shrine as Davutoglu was paying homage to the tomb of the slain Shia imam, alluding to stories of the slaughter and persecution of the Shias by the Sunni Ottomans.