The disappearance of Iraq’s religious minorities has been a troubling trend since the US-led invasion in 2003, and it has threatened to end the cultural diversity of Iraq.  As the violence in the country spikes and religious intolerance grows, many Christians, Yazidis, Mandaeans and other minority community members are leaving the country.

Last week, the head of the Iraqi Catholic Church sent a chilling warning that Iraq’s 2,000-year-old Christian community is on the brink of extinction as new waves of Christians take the journey of exodus.

The exodus is largely blamed on the worsening security since the US-led invasion that toppled former president Saddam Hussein’s regime. Christians have suffered abuses by Muslim extremists and militias, including brutal attacks, death threats and forcible seizure of property.

But Chaldean patriarch Louis Sako now believes that intervention by the West in the region has exacerbated the problem by producing more chaos and conflict in the war-ravaged country, and it is this that has been driving Christians to flee.

Iraq’s Christians of different denominations were estimated at two million, or some five per cent of the population, prior to the US-led invasion. Now that number is below 450,000.

Christianity in Iraq dates back to St. Thomas, who brought the faith to ancient Mesopotamia and the two main Iraqi denominations, Chaldean and Assyrian, still survive from that period.

Since he was ordained as patriarch of Babylon and the Chaldeans in February 2013, Sako has raised the alarm about the dramatic shrinking of the Christian population in one of its oldest homes.

Sako, whose election raised hopes of stemming the tide of Iraqi Christians fleeing the country, has described the exodus as a “disaster” and warned that the number of Christians in Iraq would dwindle to a few thousand in the coming 10 years.

But in his most scathing criticism of western governments to date last week, Sako said facilities provided by Western governments to allow Iraqi Christians to leave had aggravated the situation.

“1,400 years of Islam could not uproot us from our land and our churches, while the policies of the West [have] scattered us and distributed us all around the world,” declared Sako.

“Intervention by the West in the region did not solve the problems… but on the contrary it produced more chaos and conflict,” he reportedly told a congregation in the northern city of Kirkuk.

The massive migration was triggered by the security deterioration following the US-led invasion, the sectarian tension it unleashed, and the rise of Islamist-oriented groups to power.

Though other Iraqis have suffered from terrorism, Christians have been targeted largely for being an ethnic and religious minority whose cultural characteristics are different from those of the dominant Muslim groups in Iraq.

About 1,000 Christians may have been killed in the violence since the US-led invasion of Iraq, with dozens of churches being attacked.

Thousands of Christian families left Baghdad and other cities following the bombing of a church in Baghdad in 2010 that killed 57 people and wounded dozens of others.

In addition to the violence and intimidation, Christians have been prone to pressure from local militias to leave their homes or land. Church leaders and rights groups have been reporting increasing forcible seizures of homes belonging to Christians in Baghdad.

Land seizures and annexations of Christian villages by the Kurdish autonomous authorities have also been documented. Most of the annexations are in the northern province of Nineveh, which includes the largest remaining concentration of Christians in Iraq.

Neither the central government nor the courts have done anything to try to protect Christian property.

The Iraqi government’s response to threats to attack churches in Baghdad was to build high concrete walls around the main churches and to increase security. Yet, the government has failed to end the climate of fear surrounding the Christians.

Life for Iraq’s remaining Christian population remains extremely difficult. Those who stay in Iraq live in fear of violence, and they are subject to routine intimidation.

Other challenges include economic hardships ranging from high unemployment to closure of their businesses due to violence or intimidation or simply the lack of equal opportunities.

Worn out by the unabated chaos, Christians who have remained in Iraq have been contemplating solutions to their dilemma short of departing.  

Some Christians have been talking about an autonomous zone in the traditional Christian-dominated areas in northern Iraq. Such an entity would give the Christians the opportunity for self-rule, including policing their areas and securing their economic interests.

Detractors, however, say that the so-called Nineveh Plain Project would have enormous consequences for the Christian community in Iraq, moving the problem from one of human rights violations to a multi-ethnic geopolitical dispute.  

They say that the idea entails huge risks, including possible accusations of Christians trying to divide Iraq geographically. Moreover, the autonomous zone would be in the so-called disputed areas, which the Kurdistan Regional Government claims as part of the Kurdish enclave.

They also argue that the entity would divide Christians themselves between those who would be within the zone and the rest of the Christian community in Iraq.    

Others argue that the Iraqi Christians should work closely with other communities for national integration, peace, justice and coexistence and to contribute to restoring stability and start rebuilding the devastated nation.

Sako did not provide details about the West’s involvement in the Iraqi Christians’ wholesale migration, but the Church and political leaders have been talking about the increasing tendencies of some Western embassies in the region to facilitating the granting of asylum visas for Iraqi Christians.

In November last year, Pope Francis met with several Middle Eastern church leaders privately to discuss the current migration and later said that the Roman Catholic Church “would not accept” a Middle East without Christians.

Some religious and political leaders are also blaming world refugee and immigration organisations for encouraging the Iraqi Christians to emigrate, triggering old accusations that Western nations are plotting to displace the Christians from their Middle Eastern homelands.

Unfortunately, the dilemma of Iraq’s Christians is being manipulated in the echo-chamber of Middle East politics, where it has been reinforced to serve larger geopolitical agendas, in particular those influenced by prophesies of evangelical revival or the US political scientist Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations”.

For many observers, the migration of Iraq’s Christians is reminiscent of the exodus of Iraqi Jews in the course of the creation of Israel in the 1940s. Thousands of Iraqi Jews, part of one of the oldest and most important Jewish communities in the world that goes back to the Babylonian Captivity, were “persuaded” to leave the country.

Like Jews from other lands, Iraq’s Jews did not migrate willingly to Israel, but were “encouraged” to leave by the Zionist movement which directed them to head to Israel. The main reason was that the nascent state wanted to fill the land acquired from the expelled Palestinians with as many Jews as possible.

Indeed, the story of the massive emigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel in what was described as among the most dramatic events of Jewish exodus from the Arab world is also a cautionary tale.

Today, there is a sizable Iraqi-Jewish community around the world, numbering nearly three-quarters of a million. Most of them live in Israel, while others opted to live in the United States and other Western countries.

If history serves as a parallel, the demographic changes this time will have far-reaching consequences. The area, which prides itself as being the birthplace of humanity’s three major religions and has been characterised by its cultural diversity for millennium, will cease to exist in its present form.      

What Sako is proposing is that the West should not encourage Christians to leave the region. Instead, Western governments and Churches in the West should help with the financing of particular projects that will enable Christians to stay and improve their living conditions.

Community leaders have been urging Western countries to do as much as they can to ensure that Iraqi Christians are protected by the government. They also urge them to channel more funds to provide them with their needs, such as schools, healthcare and jobs.

Like his predecessor’s pleas which died a quiet death with barely any consideration, Sako’s warnings are expected to fall on deaf ears.

It is unlikely that Western countries will commit themselves to a policy that would discourage Iraqi Christians from emigrating from their country.

Already, the Western powers are keen to accept Iraqi Christian refugees because Iraqi and other Middle East Christians have become fair game on the larger Middle East chessboard. 

Many Iraqis viewed this week’s parliamentary elections as their last hope and went to cast their votes even though they were not particularly optimistic. Meanwhile, the violence in the country showed no signs of abating in the days leading up to the elections, with gunmen killing candidates and bombers assaulting election commission offices and campaign gatherings.

Millions of Iraqis voted to decide the 328 members of the country’s parliament, which will in turn choose a president and a prime minister. Some 9,000 candidates stood for election, and preliminary results are expected to emerge next week.

Pre-ballot initial estimates indicated that the elections would see a significant turnout.Voting for Iraqis living abroad kicked off on Sunday, but media outlets reported a low turn out from the 700,000 registered Iraqi expatriates.

No single bloc is expected to win a majority of the seats in the new parliament, the third since the US-led invasion in 2003 that toppled the regime of former president Saddam Hussein.

Since Saddam’s ouster, Iraq’s politics have been dominated by ethnic and sectarian divisions. The election campaign focused on competition within the three main ethnic and religious communities: Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims and ethnic Kurds.

The Shias were split between Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s State of Law Coalition, Muqtada Al-Sadr’s Sadrist Trend and the Citizen Coalition of cleric Ammar Al-Hakim’s Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq.

The Sunnis were split between parliamentary speaker Osama Al-Nujaifi’s Muttahidoon List and Deputy Prime Minister Saleh Al-Mutlaq’s Al-Arabiya List.

Al-Maliki is eying a third term in office despite a veritable maelstrom of protests, security deterioration and massive accusations of corruption and incompetence. He has been criticised as after eight years under his rule Iraq is cracking even further as the ever-increasing strain of the post-US occupation transition undermines both the state and society.

Both Sunni Arab leaders and the Kurds have already signalled that they do not trust Al-Maliki and are unwilling to submit to his centralist and autocratic tendencies.

The Sunnis have been protesting against exclusion and marginalisation by his government and demanding it address their grievances.

The protests were part of a larger uprising that later grew into an armed rebellion across the Sunni-dominated provinces. In December last year, the army moved into Anbar province to quash the insurgency, but more than five months later many parts of the vast province are still under rebel control.

The Kurds have been engaged in a bitter dispute with Al-Maliki over the centralisation of power and distribution of national wealth. As relations between the country’s Kurds and Al-Maliki’s government have worsened, some Kurdish leaders have started calling for Kurdish independence.

Many Shia religious and political leaders are also frustrated with Al-Maliki’s ineffectiveness, and they are urging their supporters to search for a new leader. Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the Iraqi Shias’ most revered cleric, has been showing increasing signs of dissatisfaction with Al-Maliki and has quietly been calling for a replacement.

On Saturday, Ayatollah Basheer Al-Najafi, one of four prominent clerics in the Najaf Shia seminary, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, which forbade the re-election of Al-Maliki. 

Al-Maliki’s power base among the Shia may still be strong, but his credentials are looking weaker as his behaviour has become increasingly autocratic. Judged by his performance, Al-Maliki has failed in almost everything from restoring security and peace to the war-ravaged country to curbing corruption and providing services.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed since he assumed office in 2006, and millions have gone into exile or are in internal displacement though he commands an army of about a million soldiers and police with a US$20 billion budget.

During his tenure, corruption has become endemic and bribes, graft, extortion, and blackmailing have become a way of life. Public services such as electricity, water, sewage, education and healthcare have seriously deteriorated because of corruption, mismanagement and the lack of investment and maintenance.  

Iraq’s economy has been wracked by chaos, with the country heavily relying on imports of almost all its needs of consumer and basic goods.

Though Al-Maliki’s government has received more than US$700 billion in oil revenues since it took office eight years ago, the country’s current account deficit reached 35 per cent this year.

Al-Maliki’s government has been functioning without a budget and with major projects threatened with closure and foreign companies threatening to leave. Al-Maliki has been banking on sales from petroleum to oil his government and security machines and to subdue his political rivals and buy loyalty.

The final word on who will be Iraq’s next prime minister may not be known for months, making many Iraqis fear that with so much power in his hands Al-Maliki may try to uproot the opposition in his attempt for a third term.

His election trajectory is clear, and he will try to gather 165 members in the new parliament to declare that he has a majority of votes in order to allow him to form a government.

Among the most serious concerns of his critics is that he might try to influence the balloting and change the outcome of the elections in his favour in order to get the largest share of the votes.

The Iraqi media have been reporting that Al-Maliki has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy votes and build alliances with small groups, offering government jobs, houses and offering other incentives.

He has also sought to manipulate the country’s electoral commission, rendering some of its officials submissive to his orders. There is concern that as the country’s commander-in-chief of the armed forces Al-Maliki may resort to forcing the military and the security forces to vote in his favour.

Although his re-election is questionable, analysts warn that disasters would befall Iraq if Al-Maliki were re-elected. They say the damage of a third Al-Maliki term could be irrevocable.

For instance, Al-Maliki will most certainly continue his marginalisation of the Sunni Arabs, which will in turn drive more Sunnis into the insurgency.

One result of the Sunni radicalisation is that Iraq will remain gripped in sectarian turmoil with immense regional consequences and tumultuous relations with its neighbours.

The already stalemated relations with the Kurdistan Regional Government over the export of oil and disputed territories will take a turn for the worse and the Kurds may opt to move further away from Baghdad.

Al-Maliki’s re-election will further strain relations with other Shia groups and could trigger internecine Shia fighting.

However, the results of the elections are not predictable, and though the Iraqis may have wanted accountability and change it’s too soon to tell which way that will manifest itself.

What is clear, however, is that like in the two previous elections since Saddam’s downfall most Iraqis have voted for their ethnic and sectarian interests and have not cast their ballots thinking about the national picture.

This could mean that the elections are a surreal exercise because they will only reproduce the same old faces and recycle the ill-fated political process that has already pushed Iraq into stagnation.

As a result, Iraq will become increasingly polarised: between Al-Maliki and his rivals; between Shias, Sunnis and Kurds; between the devout Shias and the secularists; and between Sunni politicians and insurgents.

Worse still, if Al-Maliki tries to outmanoeuver his rivals to stay in power he will create geographical and political divisions that will further tear the social fabric and erode the state structure. 

After 2010’s inconclusive elections, communal leaders spent ten months of bargaining before they reached an agreement on a coalition government. The winners in this year’s elections also have a lot of horse-trading to do in order to build a partnership of necessity.

This is how Iraq will be caught once again in a democratic vicious circle. But this time round Iraq’s post-elections deadlock will be more ominous than few will have foreseen.

Unless Iraq’s feuding communities remove their red lines and work closely together to rebuild the state and society on the bases of equality and justice, Iraq will continue rattling along with a high possibility of a catastrophic civil war.

Trumpeting the growth in Iraq’s oil income is misleading in the absence of genuine economic development, writes Salah Nasrawi