.Iraq’s Assyrian Christians find refuge in Kurdistan
AINKAWA, Iraq -- For Rajo Qardaq Palander, a church security guard, the breaking point came last year, when insurgents demanded that he pay $20,000 or abandon his home in Baghdad's Dora neighborhood.
The choice was easy. He slipped out of Dora in the dead of night, joining the exodus of Assyrian Christians from Baghdad and Mosul to this haven in Iraq's Kurdish-controlled north.
"I held on as long as I could," said Palander, 35. "I have no future in Iraq."
One of Iraq's most ancient national groups, the Assyrian Christians, who are Eastern Orthodox Christians, have largely quit their ancestral home in Arab Iraq and fled to the Kurdish region, where tens of thousands now live, or abroad.
The pressure on the Assyrians continues: Five churches were bombed in Baghdad in early July, and killings continue in Mosul. In Ainkawa, a city of 40,000 on the outskirts of the main city of Irbil, there's sanctuary: castlelike churches that dominate entire city blocks. Liquor -- a trade that Christians dominated in Baghdad -- also is for sale openly in Ainkawa.
Still, refugees and others who are choosing to stay in Iraq fear the days ahead. They're hoping to make political gains in Iraq's Kurdish provinces and to reclaim lost land.
"For the time being, it's a better place. But it's a dark future," said Father Isha Najiba, an Eastern Assyrian priest in Ainkawa who served in Dora until 2002.
He stresses that everyone in Iraq has suffered because of the war. The numbers of Assyrians make the pain especially acute for a minority proud of its history as the descendants of an empire that covered much of northern Iraq, Syria, Turkey and parts of Iran in pre-biblical times.
"If 100 Muslims die, it will have the same impact as the killing of one Christian because there are so few of us," Najiba said. The number of Assyrians and Chaldean Catholics remaining in Iraq -- including Kurdistan -- is hard to pin down, with estimates ranging from 150,000 to 800,000. It's accepted that the war has driven as much as half the former population to seek refuge outside Iraq.
Najiba said that only 150 of the 1,100 Assyrians who lived in his Dora neighborhood before the war are still in Baghdad. The others are in Syria, Jordan or such cities as Ainkawa in Iraq's Kurdish provinces.
They leave a visible mark in Ainkawa. Residents say a third to half the people living here fled Baghdad or Mosul since the war started more than six years ago.
A huge poster showing Pope Benedict XVI greeting Kurdish President Massoud Barzani looms over the main intersection leading into the city, reflecting Barzani's overtures to the growing community.
Green banners for Heineken beer hang from restaurants and bars, advertising a hidden vice in the Muslim cities that surround Ainkawa.
The Kurds "don't do anything to harm us, and that's enough," said Samir Francis, 35, whose home in Dora was blown up two weeks after he abandoned it in 2006, a message telling him not to return.
Others are looking past the physical security and trying to reacquire land and protect their rights in Kurdistan. Assyrians are said to be the oldest ethnic group to live in the region known today as Iraq. Three millennia ago, they controlled an empire that extended from modern-day Syria to Turkey and included northern Iraq and parts of Iran.
Their native language is Aramaic, which is thought to be the language Jesus spoke. Assyrians are Christians and belong to the Assyrian Church, a Catholic rite, as well as the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Chaldean Church, both eastern Orthodox rites.
Assyrians have been scattered across the globe since the Ottoman Empire flushed many of them out of Turkey in the early 20th century. They've lost territory in Iraq to Kurds and Arabs alike. Many Assyrians who could afford to leave fled the country under Saddam Hussein's Baath regime, settling in Europe, the U.S. and Australia.
Many now live in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley, two primary destinations for Assyrians seeking refugee status in the U.S.
Before the U.S. military invasion in 2003, Assyrians in Iraq numbered 1.5 million, or some 8 percent of Iraq's population. At least half of them have since fled the country, however, after Assyrian churches, shops and businesses were attacked.
Assyrians and Chaldean Catholics describe Saddam's tenure as a time of persecution, but it was the sectarian violence that ripped apart Iraq between 2005 and 2008 that drove them from Baghdad and Mosul. They blame mostly Sunni Muslim insurgents.
Their main concern in Ainkawa today centers on the power of the two leading Kurdish political parties, Barzani's Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Assyrians say their job prospects are limited if they don't join the KDP or the PUK.
Kurds are sensitive to charges that they ignore minority rights because of their history as victims of mass killings committed by Saddam's military. They say they were careful to respect Christian rights when they wrote a regional constitution that recognizes minority languages, allows them to run their own schools and buy property.
"We were oppressed; we don't want to do the same thing," said Wais Mohammad, a general director in the Kurdish ministry that oversees the affairs of displaced Iraqis.
TimesDispatch
The choice was easy. He slipped out of Dora in the dead of night, joining the exodus of Assyrian Christians from Baghdad and Mosul to this haven in Iraq's Kurdish-controlled north.
"I held on as long as I could," said Palander, 35. "I have no future in Iraq."
One of Iraq's most ancient national groups, the Assyrian Christians, who are Eastern Orthodox Christians, have largely quit their ancestral home in Arab Iraq and fled to the Kurdish region, where tens of thousands now live, or abroad.
The pressure on the Assyrians continues: Five churches were bombed in Baghdad in early July, and killings continue in Mosul. In Ainkawa, a city of 40,000 on the outskirts of the main city of Irbil, there's sanctuary: castlelike churches that dominate entire city blocks. Liquor -- a trade that Christians dominated in Baghdad -- also is for sale openly in Ainkawa.
Still, refugees and others who are choosing to stay in Iraq fear the days ahead. They're hoping to make political gains in Iraq's Kurdish provinces and to reclaim lost land.
"For the time being, it's a better place. But it's a dark future," said Father Isha Najiba, an Eastern Assyrian priest in Ainkawa who served in Dora until 2002.
He stresses that everyone in Iraq has suffered because of the war. The numbers of Assyrians make the pain especially acute for a minority proud of its history as the descendants of an empire that covered much of northern Iraq, Syria, Turkey and parts of Iran in pre-biblical times.
"If 100 Muslims die, it will have the same impact as the killing of one Christian because there are so few of us," Najiba said. The number of Assyrians and Chaldean Catholics remaining in Iraq -- including Kurdistan -- is hard to pin down, with estimates ranging from 150,000 to 800,000. It's accepted that the war has driven as much as half the former population to seek refuge outside Iraq.
Najiba said that only 150 of the 1,100 Assyrians who lived in his Dora neighborhood before the war are still in Baghdad. The others are in Syria, Jordan or such cities as Ainkawa in Iraq's Kurdish provinces.
They leave a visible mark in Ainkawa. Residents say a third to half the people living here fled Baghdad or Mosul since the war started more than six years ago.
A huge poster showing Pope Benedict XVI greeting Kurdish President Massoud Barzani looms over the main intersection leading into the city, reflecting Barzani's overtures to the growing community.
Green banners for Heineken beer hang from restaurants and bars, advertising a hidden vice in the Muslim cities that surround Ainkawa.
The Kurds "don't do anything to harm us, and that's enough," said Samir Francis, 35, whose home in Dora was blown up two weeks after he abandoned it in 2006, a message telling him not to return.
Others are looking past the physical security and trying to reacquire land and protect their rights in Kurdistan. Assyrians are said to be the oldest ethnic group to live in the region known today as Iraq. Three millennia ago, they controlled an empire that extended from modern-day Syria to Turkey and included northern Iraq and parts of Iran.
Their native language is Aramaic, which is thought to be the language Jesus spoke. Assyrians are Christians and belong to the Assyrian Church, a Catholic rite, as well as the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Chaldean Church, both eastern Orthodox rites.
Assyrians have been scattered across the globe since the Ottoman Empire flushed many of them out of Turkey in the early 20th century. They've lost territory in Iraq to Kurds and Arabs alike. Many Assyrians who could afford to leave fled the country under Saddam Hussein's Baath regime, settling in Europe, the U.S. and Australia.
Many now live in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley, two primary destinations for Assyrians seeking refugee status in the U.S.
Before the U.S. military invasion in 2003, Assyrians in Iraq numbered 1.5 million, or some 8 percent of Iraq's population. At least half of them have since fled the country, however, after Assyrian churches, shops and businesses were attacked.
Assyrians and Chaldean Catholics describe Saddam's tenure as a time of persecution, but it was the sectarian violence that ripped apart Iraq between 2005 and 2008 that drove them from Baghdad and Mosul. They blame mostly Sunni Muslim insurgents.
Their main concern in Ainkawa today centers on the power of the two leading Kurdish political parties, Barzani's Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Assyrians say their job prospects are limited if they don't join the KDP or the PUK.
Kurds are sensitive to charges that they ignore minority rights because of their history as victims of mass killings committed by Saddam's military. They say they were careful to respect Christian rights when they wrote a regional constitution that recognizes minority languages, allows them to run their own schools and buy property.
"We were oppressed; we don't want to do the same thing," said Wais Mohammad, a general director in the Kurdish ministry that oversees the affairs of displaced Iraqis.
TimesDispatch
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