Salvaging Childhood After ISIS in Iraq
CALL him the marbles wizard of Karmles. And in addition to excelling at one of the world’s oldest games, Noeh illustrates the precarious existence of Christians in the Mideast. The 13-year-old boy who grew up in that majority Chaldean Christian town in northern Iraq, near Mosul, was really at it back in August 2014, shooting marbles with his friends and winning big.
“I made a lot of marbles that day,” he told me recently, speaking through a translator in his native Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. (He and others from the village asked to withhold their last names for safety reasons.)
Life was good, but three days after that last game, the Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers who had protected Karmles decided they could no longer do so. They dropped their arms and disappeared. ISIS, which had already decimated other Christian and Yezidi towns, raping, killing and torching everything in sight, would soon enter the town.
That evening, a local priest went around town telling everyone they needed to leave. Immediately. And that meant the marbles stayed.
“I left in my pajamas and flip flops,” he said. His parents and five siblings started on a trek to nearby Erbil, at the heart of Iraqi Kurdistan. What should have been a short car trip instead lasted 10 hours, as they tried to evade ISIS checkpoints and other dangers.
What followed was three years of exile in Kurdish-controlled Erbil, where the Chaldeans of Karmles stayed behind a church and mostly kept to themselves. “My only friends were Christian,” Noeh said. He tried to ask a few Kurdish kids for a marbles game, but they weren’t interested.
Mostly, he said, he missed his room back home — the toys, the PlayStation and, of course, his trophy marbles collection.
Three years passed. The war against ISIS gelled this year into a victory that mostly chased the fanatical murderers out of Iraq. The anti-ISIS coalition recaptured the Mosul area, where the Islamist terrorists initially had their biggest victory and where they planted the black flag, claiming the oil-rich region as a pillar of their self-declared caliphate.
This past summer, the people of Karmles finally returned. What they found was, well, not much. Their town was almost completely burned down. Not much was left of Noeh’s family home. They did, however, find some of the boy’s charred marbles, left in the ashes where his room once was.
They started rebuilding, and for the first time in three years a Christmas tree is now gracing Karmles. Noeh’s family joined a group that toured the US recently to raise awareness to the plight of Iraqi Christians.
Their trip brought the family to the White House, where Noeh gave Vice President Mike Pence some of his charred marbles.
Pence planned to go to the Mideast, where he would highlight Christian suffering. But the veep’s trip got delayed a few times, and by the time it could be carried out, the administration had recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, leading to tensions between the community and the White House. Some Christian leaders, including Egypt’s Coptic pope, declined to meet with Pence.
Religious rivalries are taken quite seriously in the Mideast. So is sectarianism. Which is why Noeh’s is a familiar story across a region that has little patience with minorities.
So what will happen to the Chaldeans of Karmles?
“It’s kind of safe now,” says Taher, a church leader. Yet there’s still much tension in northern Iraq. After the Kurds declared independence, they were beaten down by the national army, aided by Iranian-backed militias. That battle isn’t quite settled yet and may heat up again.
“So we don’t trust in the future a lot,” Taher says. “We just finished this ISIS trauma. I don’t think something similar will come up, because nothing is worse than ISIS. But tension between Arabs and Kurds may reflect badly on us.”
Mideast fanaticism comes in waves. Right now tensions in Iraq are at a low ebb, but an extremist heir to al Qaeda and ISIS can at any point relaunch a battle against “infidels” like Chaldean Christians. And another war will start. For all the marbles.
That’s the last thing boys like Noeh need.
‘ Not much was left of Noe h’ s family home. They did, however, find some of the ’ boy’ s char red marbles, left in the ashes.