CIVILIAN DIES IN IRAQ ROCKET ATTACK BEFORE POPE’S VISIT
▶ Ten rockets fired at airbase in Anbar is first incident since US hit Iran-backed militias in Syria
An American civilian contractor died yesterday after an early morning attack on a military base in Iraq, the Pentagon said.
Spokesman John Kirby said the contractor “suffered a cardiac episode while sheltering and sadly passed away shortly after”.
No US service members were injured and all were accounted for after the attack on Al Asad Airbase in Anbar province
Ten rockets were launched at the base at about 7.20am. Mr Kirby said the rockets were fired from east of the base.
No militia or group claimed responsibility for the attack.
“Iraqi security forces are on scene and investigating,” Mr Kirby said.
“We cannot attribute responsibility at this time, and we do not have a complete picture of the extent of the damage. We stand by as needed to assist our Iraqi partners as they investigate.”
The Iraqi military said the attack did not cause significant losses and that security forces found a lorry that was used to launch the rockets.
It was the first attack since the US conducted an air strike on Iran-backed militia targets along the Iraq-Syria border last week, killing one militiaman.
The incident happened two days before Pope Francis is set to visit Iraq despite concerns about security and the coronavirus pandemic.
The trip will include stops in Baghdad, southern Iraq and the northern city of Erbil.
Yesterday’s attack drew condemnation from European nations who have troops in Iraq.
“These terrorist attacks undermine the fight against Daesh and destabilise Iraq,” British ambassador to Iraq Stephen Hickey tweeted, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS.
Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod wrote on Twitter: “Despicable attacks against Ain Al Asad base in Iraq are completely unacceptable.”
The Danish armed forces said that two Danes who were at the base at the time of the attack were not injured.
Pope Francis yesterday confirmed that his trip to Iraq starting tomorrow would go ahead as planned, in spite of the rocket attack on a military base hosting US forces.
“The day after tomorrow, God willing, I will go to Iraq for a three-day pilgrimage,” he said in his weekly Wednesday address.
The Pope, 84, is expected to arrive in Baghdad for a threeday, five-city visit that will take him to historic sites around the country.
It will be his first foreign trip abroad since the start of the coronavirus pandemic and the first papal trip to Iraq.
“The Iraqi people are waiting for us, he said.
“They were waiting for Saint John Paul II, who was forbidden to go. One cannot disappoint a people for the second time. Let us pray that this journey will be successful.”
Pope John Paul II had to cancel a planned trip in 2000 after a breakdown in talks with the government of dictator Saddam Hussein.
The pontiff made no mention of the country’s security situation. Yesterday morning, rockets landed on a military airbase that is hosting US, coalition and Iraqi forces.
“For some time, I have wanted to meet those people who suffered so much, and see that martyred church,” Pope Francis said.
The Pope was referring to Baghdad’s Lady of Salvation church that became a scene of slaughter on October 31, 2010, when armed men burst in on the congregation gathered for a Sunday service. They killed 58 people, including two priests.
Iraq’s Chaldean Catholic Patriarch, Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako, echoed the Pope’s remarks and said that the Church leader was pressing on with his planned itinerary despite his envoy catching coronavirus.
“Pope Francis is determined to visit Iraq despite the Vatican’s ambassador to Iraq Mitja Leskovar testing positive for Covid-19 days before the trip,” Cardinal Sako said in Baghdad. “It will not impact the visit.”
As apostolic nuncio to Baghdad, Mr Leskovar had been travelling across the country in recent weeks to prepare for the Pope’s visit, which will include stops at Mosul in the north, the shrine city of Najaf and the southern site of Ur.
The visit is a “gesture of love and solidarity with all Iraqis”, Cardinal Sako said. “He’s coming for all Iraqis and not only the Christians.”
On Sunday, the last full day of the visit, the Pope will visit the war-torn city of Mosul that was seized by ISIS in 2014.
During his time in the city, he will “see the results of extremism and terrorism that are only solved through constructive dialogue,” Cardinal Sako said.
On the same day, the Pope will also visit the northern city of Qaraqosh, referred to as Iraq’s Christian capital and the site of the biggest church in Nineveh Plains.
There, he will “encourage Christians to stay, to hold on to hope, to build trust with their neighbours and to co-operate for a better future”.
He will also visit Ur, birthplace of the prophet Abraham, who is revered by Christians, Muslims and Jews, and meet Iraq’s Shiite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani.
“In the land of Abraham, together with other religious leaders, we also will take another step forward in fraternity among believers,” Pope Francis said.
For Christians in Iraq, the Pope’s visit delivers a message of support.
Cardinal Sako said it told them that “they are not forgotten and to encourage them to stay, we have to turn a new page”.
The Pope’s pilgrimage ends with a farewell ceremony at Baghdad’s airport on Sunday.
On Friday, Pope Francis will conduct his first foreign visit since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic – to Iraq.
The pontiff’s multi-city tour will take him to the capital, Baghdad, and Erbil, as well as to the holy city of Najaf, where he will meet Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani. He will also travel to the town of Qaraqosh, whose Christians were forcibly exiled when ISIS militants invaded the Nineveh plains and declared their so-called caliphate in 2014. In keeping with his focus on interfaith dialogue, the Pope will travel to Nasiriya for an interreligious meeting at the Plain of Ur, believed to be the birthplace of the prophet Abraham. It is his first foray to the Middle East since signing the Declaration of Fraternity in Abu Dhabi with Grand Imam of Al Azhar Mosque in Egypt, Dr Ahmed Al Tayeb, in 2019.
The visit is laced with both great symbolism and great danger. The entire Vatican delegation travelling with the Pope has been vaccinated against the coronavirus, which is raging throughout Iraq at the moment and, two weeks ago, forced another national lockdown (over 700,000 cases of the virus have been recorded over the past year). From a security standpoint, while Iraq is much safer than it was when ISIS was rampaging throughout the country, it has continued to endure confrontations between various Iran-backed militias and the US, in addition to occasional terrorist bombings. The events and masses that the Pope will hold will be an enormous challenge to secure.
The visit is also crucial to building on the Abu Dhabi declaration, after a year of pandemic, but is also an important signal of support for Christians of the East, many of whom fled in the course of ISIS’s reign of terror in Iraq and Syria, forced to abandon ancestral homelands, their houses of worship defaced or destroyed. I interviewed Iraqi Chaldeans in 2014 in Beirut, where a few thousand had sought refuge, and few I met wanted to stay in the Middle
East, traumatised by the betrayal of some of their neighbours, who had found common cause with the militants. They hoped Lebanon would be a stopover to safer shores in Europe or North America.
I am particularly struck, however, by one element of the Pope’s itinerary, and that is his planned visit to Hosh Al Bieaa (Church Square) in Mosul, to recite a “prayer of suffrage” for victims of ISIS. Mosul was the crown jewel of the so-called caliphate, and its most populous city. The city was fully liberated after a gruelling, months-long battle in July 2017, but not before ISIS committed numerous atrocities against its citizens and numerous civilians were killed in the crossfire.
In addition to the Christians exiled from or killed in Iraq, ISIS claimed victims of multiple faiths and denominations. They slaughtered Shia civilians and army cadets, enslaved, killed and raped Yazidis and tortured and murdered Sunnis. Yet for all the suffering visited upon the Middle East’s peoples, one key element is often lacking in the cultural conversation: a simple acknowledgment of this suffering.
Justice has, of course, been elusive for a long time in the region. Nobody has or will pay for their part in some of the bloodiest conflicts of the last century or even the last decade in Syria, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere, notwithstanding individual cases of prosecutions in some European countries.
But in the absence of that kind of accountability and transitional justice, what source of succour is there for victims and their families who seek closure and a simple affirmation of their pain? When was the last time a government or individual in the region acknowledged and apologised for their role in perpetrating a crime against their fellow citizens? Where are the memorials for the victims of torture in Syria’s dungeons, the refugees who drowned in the Mediterranean, those who died in Lebanon’s suicide bombings in the mid-2010s, the people killed or displaced by the various militias in Iraq, the Palestinians who died in various Israeli offensives over the past 20 years or the Libyans and Yemenis killed by their countrymen or agents of foreign powers? The government in Lebanon is so adamantly opposed to any kind of reckoning with the recent cataclysmic explosion in Beirut that, rather than find some way to help those who were rendered homeless by it or lost their loved ones in it, it is instead actively undermining the judicial investigation.
If you think even this simple acknowledgment is of no value, consider how much pain Turkey’s refusal to recognise the mass killing of Armenians continues to elicit a century later. Arguments over the label of “genocide” ignore the suffering of victims and their families, while failing to address the crimes of the past.
I don’t know why we are so reluctant to acknowledge the wounds of our fellow human beings. Perhaps it flies in the face of the heroic resistance narrative or our masculine and patriarchal self-image, or because acknowledging past mistakes may create a moral or legal imperative to act to lift the distress of citizens (what a novel concept) when the region’s powerful can instead hide behind exhortations to steadfastness and resilience. Or perhaps they fear that acknowledging the sins of the past will reopen wounds they thought cauterised.
But if the past traumatic decade has taught us anything, it should have taught us that these wounds are rarely closed. When papered over, they simply continue to fester below the surface, ready to rage again.
For all the pain visited on the people here, so many in the Middle East forget to acknowledge their suffering