Iraqi Christians in a "Sea of Muslims"

CBN.com –Americans say their war on terror is not a war against Islam. But some Muslims disagree; they see this present conflict as an epic struggle of Islam versus Christianity.

This is why many of the 660,000 Christians still living in Iraq are nervous.

If the west begins a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein, will Muslims in Iraq turn on their Christian neighbors? What will become of them in a post-Saddam world?

Pretty much everyone lives in fear in Iraq today. So in the televised story we hid the faces of many of the Christians.

Terry Law is a minister who was in Iraq just a month ago, bringing food to poor believers and medical aid to cash-strapped hospitals. He says fear of Saddam Hussein is absolute.

Law said, about pictures of Saddam seen everywhere in Iraq, "This ominous face and eyes are watching you everywhere you go, and there's a terror and absolute fear in the nation of their leader."

Law found Iraqis were afraid to speak openly, even in their own front rooms.

Law asked, "Would you say there's a lot of fear?" An Iraqi Lady dared to say, "We can't talk about it." She moved her hand across her mouth. "We have to keep quiet," she said.

Law related, "I was in the privacy of Christian homes, trying to encourage them to say something about their leadership. They said, 'No. We've told our children don't say anything political. You go to school and make a political statement, they'll come to our home and kill us'."

This daily fear is what the Christians of Iraq-many of them Assyrians, not Arabs-have been reduced to.

Ken Joseph is an Assyrian; who now lives in Japan. He says his people were once proud rulers of an ancient empire that stretched across the Middle East.

Joseph added, "The Assyrians were the people Jonah went to."

He also pointed out, "It was those same Assyrians that were the first major people group, eventually country, to accept the Gospel. And then beyond that, the Assyrians were the largest missionary movement in the past.

John Nimrod is Director of the Assyrian Universal Alliance. He says his Christian people now face and have faced centuries of persecution in the land they once ruled. Nimrod told us, "We are the 'American Indians' of Iraq." He says the Assyrians are now second-class citizens in their own homeland.

Joseph concurred, "The Christians are in a particularly precarious position because you have a 'sea of Muslims' and a small, tiny group of Christians with no one to protect them."

Joseph's own grandparents had to flee from Iraq, in 1919, to survive a massacre of Assyrians by the Muslim Kurds. Muslim Kurds share-and covet-the land around what was Nineveh.

Nimrod said, "First of all, we're discriminated against because we are Christians. Secondly, we are discriminated against because we are pro-West."

Joseph added that, "The Christians have always been seen as agents of the West, because they were Christians. Previously, Iraq was governed by the British. It was the Assyrians who aligned with the British. So once the British were gone, the Assyrians were put at the mercy of the government that ensued."

Tragically, widespread slaughter followed, and present-day Assyrians are concerned lest it happen again.

Law explained, "I think the concern they have is a fundamentalist [Muslim] regime succeeding Saddam Hussein and becoming a lot more like, say Iran across the border one way, or Saudi Arabia across the border another way."

So Iraq's Christians live in fear today. But they fear the future, too-worried they may lose what religious freedom they have now. That little bit of freedom is due to something hard to believe: Saddam-for all his evil-hasn't discriminated much against Christianity.

Joseph further explained, "Iraq is unique in the Middle East, in that it is one of the few countries that have a secular government. Most of the other countries have these very strict Islamic governments."

Law agrees. "Saddam's regime, strangely enough, has been relatively moderate in dealing with Christianity and allowing Christians freedom."

But, the fundamentalist Muslim regimes surrounding Iraq have chased out most of their Christians.

Because of Iraq's tendency not to discriminate as much, if there's anywhere that could nourish a homeland for Christians in the Middle East, it could well be Iraq.

Joseph said, "The dream of the Assyrians is to have their country back, or at least some measure of autonomy, so that Christians throughout the world who have been scattered, and would like to return, would feel confident enough to return back again."

To get to that day, the people of Iraq may well have to go through another war.

Law told us, "Everywhere I went people said 'when are you going to bomb us?'

Families Law met described their terror as, during the last Gulf War, bombs crashed around them. An Iraqi Lady said, "All the windows were broken."
Law said, "The children were screaming. She said 'to this day those children have memories of the bombing and it traumatized them'."

But Salam, an Iraqi Christian we met in Israel said, "War may be a necessity."
Salam added, "It's the only way to force Iraq to listen…. So, yes, I believe the United Nations or America should go into Iraq and help the Iraqi people."

So, there is hope. An Iraqi Lady said, "What is going to happen? It's God's will."

Law explained, "They don't want the drama and the trauma of an attack, but at the same time they are desperate to remove the current regime."

So, worried about war, but hungry for freedom, the Assyrians and other Iraqi Christians are desperate to get fellow believers praying for them. Joseph pled, "Please pray for the Christians in Iraq."

Salam said, "My message to every Christian, to people, all Christians around the world: please pray for us, because we need your prayers. " He further said,
"They should not depend on their weapons or their army or their strength. They should depend on Jesus, the truth, and power through their praying."

Joseph added a different perspective when he said, "God could use this terrible situation not only as a way to bring the Christians back to the Middle East, but to bring Revival to the oldest church in the world."

Sounds to me like the Christians in Iraq are better off than Christians in most Islamic states, but not any better off than any other Iraqis. That they get to live as well as all the other cattle in the slaughterhouse is a funny reason for suggesting that Saddam has been good for Iraqi Christians.

No one in this interview says that they want Saddam to stay in power, and their unwillingness to answer suggests that they don't. If they supported him, they surely wouldn't have to be afraid to say so. The only person who takes a definite position says that the UN and the US ought to take Saddam out.

It seems to me that these people are saying two things: "War is really horrible" and "It would be even worse for us under Islamists." These are undoubted truths.

But there is no reason to think that very many people in Iraq want an Islamist regime. The most important thing that happened in the Iran-Iraq war is that the dog didn't bark - the Iraqi Shia did not take the side of the Islamic Republic. They viewed themselves as Iraqis fighting Persian foreigners, not Shia being liberated by their Shi'ite brothers. From what I read the large majority of the Iraqi Shia are still not particularly taken with the crazy Persians across the border. The mullahs have agents and groups working for them among the Shia, but I have not heard that they add up to any kind of mass movement.

The situation with the Shia in Iraq is dangerous, but not because of an immediate Islamist threat: it's just always dangerous when a majority of the population is treated like animals for many, many years by a minority. The best way to diffuse that threat is to help Iraq develop a federal republic that treats the Shia like people.

So the idea that Iraq's Christians are threatened by a torrent of virulent Islamism, with Little Saddam alone keeping his finger in the dyke, is entirely misleading. I don't blame the interviewees for worrying about it, however, and we certainly don't want to blow the post-war reconstruction so badly that we actually generate Shia Islamism (i.e., don't let the State Department and the CIA run it).

I conclude from this article that what we can do for the Iraqi Christians is (a) pray for them; (b) be immensely careful about civilian casualties (which we are going to do anyway); (c) don't do something irredeemably stupid after the war; but (d) by all means take out the evil man and the evil regime which force Christian Iraqis and Kurdish Iraqis and Shi'ite Iraqis and Sunni Iraqis and Turkmen Iraqis, all of them, to live in the state of constant pitiful fear depicted in this interview.

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