Archbishop forced to flee city gripped by terror
Top cleric says fellow Iraqi Christians faced exile, death at hands of Islamic State
For four days, Archbishop Nicodemus Daoud Matti Sharaf heard bombs going off outside his home in Mosul. Shuttered inside, he knew little about what was going on, other than that the Iraqi army and Islamic State fighters were battling for control of the city he loved.
As he sits in his brother’s home in Richmond Hill, the battle for Mosul seems very far away. The calm suburbs are a respite for him. The 39year-old archbishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church in Mosul, Kirkuk and the Kurdistan region of Iraq is here for a rest, to visit his family — his brother and his wife and their children, along with his parents, who all live here now — and to reach out to the Iraqi Christian community across the GTA.
Last year in early June, the Islamic State extremist group was closing in on Mosul. Iraqi Christians and other minorities were fearful of the outcome. But many, like the archbishop, were determined to hold tight.
“We hear the voice of the bombs,” he told the Star. “Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. But we cannot go out to know what is the situation outside. There was a curfew.”
For more than a decade, the region has been in turmoil. Life has not been easy for Iraqi Christians, especially the clergy. Since 2003 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Christian community — made up mostly of followers of the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church there, said to be as old as the religion itself — has been decimated.
At least half of the country’s Christian population has fled for safer regions such as Kurdistan or even other countries.
“For 10 or 11years, we lived in Mosul without government,” Archbishop Sharaf said. “There is no real government in Iraq. It’s like a chess game.”
Before the Islamic State group captured Mosul, Al Qaeda had a strong presence in the city, making everyday life difficult for both Christians and Muslims, says the archbishop. Al Qaeda would force Muslims to pay a heavy tax, collecting millions and then would kidnap Christians for a hefty ransom.
In those last few days before the fall of Mosul, the archbishop didn’t believe a time would come that he would have to leave his beloved archdiocese. But he worried about his parishioners and prayed for peace.
Then on the afternoon of June 9, 2014, he got a call from the interior minister of Kurdistan — a friend of his — telling him he should leave Mosul. But how could he leave, he wondered. His car would be a target. He couldn’t walk on the streets for fear of being shot.
Not knowing what to do, the archbishop called an acquaintance in the Iraqi army who also advised him to
“We lost everything — our churches, our monasteries, our houses, our history.” ARCHBISHOP NICODEMUS DAOUD MATTI SHARAF ON PLIGHT OF IRAQI CHRISTIANS AND YAZIDI REFUGEES
leave as soon as possible. He told him he would send an army escort for him. Three minutes later, the escort arrived and Archbishop Nicodemus Daoud Matti Sharaf was told he had five minutes to pack up his belongings and be escorted out of Mosul.
“I left the archdiocese house with very little — just my clothes. I forgot to take my laptop. I took just my passport and seven manuscripts that are very old.”
But he left behind hundreds of other valuable religious manuscripts dating, he says, to the second and third century of Christianity. As the entourage left, the archbishop called his priests and parishioners on his two mobile phones, frantically advising them to get out.
All around him, thousands of others were also fleeing with little more than the clothes on their back. It is an image that still haunts him today: lines of exiles walking out of their homeland in shock and fear.
A few weeks later, some of those same exiles returned to Mosul, hoping to pick up the pieces of their lives, the archbishop said. But Islamic State had different plans, telling them they must convert, pay a heavy tax or die, he said. Indeed, one Toronto Iraqi Christian told the Star his mother and sister were given that exact choice. There was no choice for them. They fled and now are in a refugee camp in Jordan.
Those who incorrectly believed they could return to life as usual under Islamic State once more had to leave their homeland. This time, however, they tried to take their possessions, says the archbishop. But Islamic State fighters were waiting for them at checkpoints and stripped them of all their worldly goods, he says.
“They took everything from them — their cars; money, gold, even baby diapers. And they told them: ‘You are dogs.’ ”
Now he, along with thousands of other Iraqi Christians, lives in exile in Ankawa, a small town in the autonomous region of Kurdistan, 90 kilometres north of Mosul.
In total, the archbishop estimates there are 140,000 Christian Iraqi refugees in Kurdistan, most of them from Mosul. Before 2003, estimates suggest, there were 130,000 Iraqi Christians in Mosul alone. Just before Islamic State took over Mosul, they were down to about 10,000, according to The Associated Press.
In exile, accommodations and food supplies are sparse. Many families are sharing caravans or shipping containers as shelter, while others are luckier and share a simple home.
At first the church was able to help provide shelter and food, but the costs have become overwhelming and international relief is needed, he says. And they’re not alone. Other exiles include the Yazidis, a religious Kurdish group also targeted by Islamic State.
“We lost everything — our churches, our monasteries, our houses, our history. Our churches in Mosul are not new churches,” the archbishop said.
“The cathedral is from the fifth or sixth century of Christianity. This is our place; our land. When someone wants to take this land, this history, they take everything, even our dignity.”
For more than a decade, asylum seekers and migrants have huddled near the French port of Calais, their eyes on one prize: a new life in Britain. Dozens have frozen or suffocated while stowing away in transport trucks that roll across the channel tunnel on rails. Others have been injured or killed in accidents.
This month thousands of migrants have risked their lives to enter Britain, setting off a blast of heated rhetoric between London and Paris, stoked by fears of invading hordes, after a wildcat strike created chaos in the port and more opportunity for risky attempts to board stalled vehicles bound for British shores.
As the refugee crisis swells, some 37,000 have been intercepted since January, and about 3,000 are now encamped near Calais. The numbers that manage to slip by and enter Britain — estimated in the hundreds — are dwarfed by the 130,000 or more people who have washed up in southern Europe by sea so far this year.
Most of the new arrivals seek asylum in Germany, Sweden or other northern European countries. But those who reach the French coast are undeterred by fear or escalating security to make a bid for Britain.
Their motives are unsurprising. They speak English but fare more poorly in other European languages. They bet on blending in and working more easily in a country without identity cards, and with less stringent labour laws than France. Many have waiting relatives’ numbers programmed into their cellphones. And some see Britain as an eventual launching pad for Canada or the United States.
British Prime Minister David Cameron has called for their removal as illegal economic migrants — a suggestion often belied by their countries of origin, where daily life is deadly and there is widespread terror and trauma.
European finger-pointing has only made things worse, highlighting the need for an agreed-upon plan to solve the problem. Although Germany and Sweden have already accepted tens of thousands, destitute Greece and fiscally challenged Italy are now bearing a large part of the burden of new arrivals. A recent European agreement to share the flow would cover only 40,000 people: less than one-quarter of those in urgent need.
It’s not only Europe’s problem. Syria’s struggling Middle Eastern neighbours have taken more than three million refugees from that terrible war. But countries like Canada have been slow to respond.
Canada has pledged to take up to 14,500 refugees in need of permanent resettlement this year, about one-fifth of the total of 80,000 agreed by the international community as a whole. The total falls far short of the almost 960,000 refugees the UN declares unable to return to their countries and in need of relocation.
Today’s spectacle is a far cry from 1979, when Canada opened its doors to 60,000 boat people after the end of the Vietnam war, then thousands of others from war-torn El Salvador and Kosovo. They are now working, paying taxes and raising children who contribute to Canada’s society and economy.
From remote Ottawa it’s easy for politicians to dismiss asylum seekers as shady chancers or queue jumpers coming to suck our bounty dry. More often the reality is 17-year-old Berhane, plucked from the Mediterranean after being starved, beaten and terrorized by smugglers while fleeing forced labour in Eritrea. He is one of many.
Sadly for them, the refugee issue appears to be off the election agenda and unlikely to get much traction this year. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon points out that 86 per cent of the world’s 60 million forcibly displaced people are harboured by poor countries, not the wealthy West. He says it is “essential that governments around the world recommit to providing refuge and safety to those who have lost everything,” by sharing the burden. In the past, Britain and other European countries have tried and failed to create a fair and orderly system. Now, the consequences are too dramatic to ignore.
Canada could take the lead once more by championing the international agreement Ban is urging. And by opening its own doors a little wider.
Hundreds of thousands of people have risked life and limb crossing the Mediterranean, creating a refugee crisis for Europe