Yezidi
Yezidi refugees inside the temple of Lalesh in Iraqi Kurdistan

This article is a preview from the Spring 2018 edition of New Humanist.

Sitting in his office, a shipping container in a refugee camp with a crucifix nailed to the wall, Ibrahim Shahba Dalu is angry. “You journalists come here, but you don’t want to write the truth,” he tells me, eyes lit up. “The truth is that we cannot live with Muslims any more. Don’t write about our houses being destroyed, write about the reality.”

Dalu is in his early 50s, with a neatly clipped grey goatee and square wire-rimmed glasses. He comes from Bartella, a city just east of Mosul in Iraq’s Nineveh plain, and was displaced when ISIS swept across the area in 2014. Like everyone else in the refugee camp, Dalu is Christian.

This camp sits in a traditionally Christian district of Erbil, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. Dalu has a coveted job working with an international NGO that administers services.

He pauses for breath before continuing, in a tone of incredulous outrage. “This country was once Christian. Can you imagine? We have been finished by Islam. Over thousands of years, we built this beautiful history. These dirty people came from dirty villages and they destroyed us. They destroyed our identity. They didn’t leave anything for us. Our problem is from long before ISIS. Inside every Muslim, there is a potential ISIS recruit.”

A young colleague – a resident of the camp – sits below a poster blue-tacked to the wall, bearing an image of the Virgin Mary. He nods in agreement. “They are forcing us to forget our identity. They destroyed everything.”

Certainly, Iraq’s Christians face a bleak situation – as do the country’s other minorities, including the Yezidis (who follow an ancient monotheistic religion), atheists, and Muslim sects such as the Shia Turkmen and Shabak. Over the last two decades in particular, Iraq has been home to a harrowing cycle of violence that has affected everyone. Dictatorship, invasion, sectarian war and a spiralling terrorist threat have cost hundreds of thousands of lives. A 2013 study estimated that 500,000 Iraqis had died from war-related causes since the 2003 US-led invasion – and that was before the ascent of ISIS. Over four million Iraqis have been displaced since 2003. The vast majority of those displaced and dead are Muslim. But religious minorities and atheists have also faced persecution and violence for many years. The International Humanist and Ethical Union ranks Iraq as one of the world’s worst places to be an atheist.

Dalu’s anger stems, in part, from a feeling that people overseas are not paying attention to the suffering of his community. But the persecution of religious minorities in Iraq has been exploited by international actors for many years, in ways that often exacerbate the problem. This raises serious ethical questions not just about assisting marginalised groups, but about the way these issues are discussed. In an era of increasing divisions and a worldwide narrative of a “clash of civilisations”, the situation of minorities in Iraq has been used to feed a dangerous discourse that does no favours to people like Dalu. How can outsiders support these groups without worsening the situation?

* * *

Dalu’s visceral anger was shocking. But it was clear that his hatred was born of a legitimate anger and sense of loss. Bartella, his home city, had recently been liberated, and Dalu had returned to see what state his old house was in. He showed me photographs of the wreckage; not just the pockmarks of bullets, but more personal acts of vandalism too. His wedding photographs with the eyes scratched out; a statuette of the Virgin Mary, beheaded; a physical assault on his personal and religious histories.

“The Europeans don’t want to listen to us,” he said. But the persecution of minorities in the Middle East – particularly Christians, but also Yezidis and atheists – has been taken up by right-wing groups in Europe and America. Frequently, this appears to be motivated more by a desire to demonstrate the barbarity of the “Muslim world” than by any real intention to help those who are suffering.

The Christian right in the US uses the idea that Christianity is under existential threat to rally its base. Extreme conservative outlets such as Fox News and Breitbart, which usually do not feature much sympathetic coverage on the Middle East, frequently run stories on their plight. A search for Iraqi Christians on Breitbart’s website calls up hundreds of results, with headlines such as “Christianity could be extinct in Iraq in five years” and “Christian militias unite to defeat Islamic State”. Donald Trump has made supportive statements about Christians in the region, with pledges to protect them. In January 2017, he tweeted: “Christians in the Middle-East have been executed in large numbers. We cannot allow this horror to continue!” In an interview that same month, talking about Syrians, he said: “If you were a Muslim you could come in [to the US], but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible.” (It is not true that Muslims have an easier time getting US asylum than Christians.)

A similar trend is evident in the UK. The extremist right-wing group Britain First has shared articles on the “Christian genocide” on their website. And in 2013, the then Ukip leader Nigel Farage – usually an opponent of immigration – called for Christians from Syria and the wider region to be given asylum in Britain, saying: “Where on earth are the Christians going to go? Christians are now a seriously persecuted minority ... they are under assault from all sides.” He modified his position after outrage from others within his party at the idea of immigration from the region, neatly illustrating the limits of this advocacy.

“This question about the protection of Christians in the Middle East and at the same time the desire to prevent immigration or to deport minority populations are clearly in conflict,” says Mark Lattimer, director of Minority Rights Group International. “They show a hypocritical attitude.”

While Trump, for example, has been vocal about the plight of Christians in the Middle East, his government is currently initiating hundreds of deportations of Iraqi Christians. Many fled to the US after the 2003 invasion, due to the heightened terrorist threat against their community. Some voted for Trump, believing he would protect them. They face serious danger if they are deported to Iraq, a country unable to guarantee their safety.

* * *

As we left Dalu’s office, my translator, a young Yezidi woman from Mount Sinjar who lost 70 relatives to ISIS captivity when the group stormed her home town, shook her head. “I can’t understand this bitterness. They might have lost property, but we have lost everything. We have lost our people.”

The persecution of minorities in Iraq has a long history. Saddam Hussein exploited and exacerbated communal tensions. The 2003 invasion of Iraq and a series of disastrous post-invasion policies imposed by the US drastically worsened the situation and set in motion a seemingly unstoppable cycle of violence. A full-blown sectarian war broke out, and militias – some funded by Iran and Saudi Arabia – rose to prominence. Since 2003, extremists have explicitly targeted Christians and other minorities, who are often seen as stand-ins for the west. At least 500,000 Christians and thousands of Yezidis (the data is inconclusive) left Iraq after Saddam fell. Very few people in Iraq openly identify as atheist due to the danger this poses, but many who do so have sought refuge overseas. So there was an irony when in 2007 Condoleezza Rice was asked about Iraq’s religious minorities, and responded that the US didn’t intervene in “sectarian” issues.

An already bleak situation worsened when ISIS seized control of swathes of the country in 2014, seeking among other things to eradicate religious minorities. The group released videos expounding the second-class status of Christians and showing mass killings. Less visible communities, such as the Shia Turkmen, also suffered forced conversions, slaughter and displacement.

The assault on the Yezidi community was particularly egregious and captured the world’s imagination; ISIS massacred the men, and took hundreds of women captive as sex slaves. These were heinous crimes that deserved recognition and condemnation. Yet the coverage in the Western media soon became sensationalised, shifting to salacious details of slave markets and gang rapes. My Yezidi translator told me she has refused to proceed in interviews where Western journalists have asked survivors details like “how many times a day were you raped?”

There are some excellent counterpoints to this. One such example is the British journalist Cathy Otten’s recent book With Ash on Their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State (OR Books). In a forensic and detailed account of the crimes against this community, Otten explicitly engages with the often sensational coverage that has gone before. “This book is the work of one person from a country with a violent colonial history in Iraq, and with undoubted ingrained biases and perspective,” she warns at the outset.

Otten explains, in some detail, the complex identities of religious minorities in Iraq. Over the years, Yezidis, she explains, have been subject to programmes of “Arabisation” and of political exploitation by the Kurds. Today, she writes, “Yezidis are stuck in a complex series of client-patron relationships with Kurdish leaders where ethnic identification is used in exchange for promises of safety.” While the most compelling section of the book is the harrowing yet inspirational stories of Yezidi women in ISIS captivity and their efforts to regain freedom, Otten illustrates that this community was marginalised before ISIS arrived – and outlines US complicity in laying the ground for later violence.

* * *

Leaving the Christian camp in Erbil, the translator and I walked a short distance to a hollowed-out structure started and abandoned by property speculators. Now, 27 Yezidi families live inside this construction site, which has ceilings and floors but no walls. Kacho Ali Meho has lived in a tent inside this building with his wife and children since they escaped ISIS in 2014.

Although his tone is gentler than Dalu’s, Meho shares some of his suspicion. He says he has a friendly relationship with the displaced Christians who live nearby, but cannot trust Muslims after his neighbours turned on him when ISIS arrived. “We have lived with Christians these last three years, but we cannot trust other communities.”

Meho’s eyes fill with tears when he says that he longs to see his land once more, but he does not plan to return. “Everyone who could has already left Iraq. If we had money, we would go too, but we do not have any money to pay smugglers,” he says. “We hope that Canada will offer us asylum, but I do not know if the West wants to help us.”

He shares with Dalu a sense of being forgotten by the outside world, and an understandable desperation for something – anything – to happen to help him and his family out of their miserable situation. But in Iraq, international intervention has often been cack-handed and dangerously counterproductive, failing to take into account complicated ground dynamics.

To an extent, the position of religious minorities in Iraq is on the international agenda today in a way that it hasn’t been in years past. When the Yezidi community were trapped on Mount Sinjar in 2014, Obama ordered airstrikes at ISIS targets, and a humanitarian programme to drop food aid onto the mountain. For most Yezidis, it was too little too late. This intervention has continued unabated ever since, with daily airstrikes by the US against ISIS targets. A recent investigation by the New York Times found that the rate of civilian casualties as a result of this campaign was 31 times higher than the Pentagon claimed.

In 2015 the UN Security Council called a special meeting to discuss the plight of religious minorities in Iraq. Over the last two years, the UN, the US and the EU have all formally classified the persecution of Christians and Yezidis in Iraq as genocide. In January this year, the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Taverne called for the British government to stop ignoring the persecution of non-religious people in Iraq and to treat it with the same seriousness as discrimination against other groups.

But it is worth noting that Western powers rarely – if ever – acknowledge their own role in precipitating the chaos in Iraq and the ensuing disaster for these groups. And this lack of reflection or engagement with a complicated web of sectarian resentment, a tinderbox where every community has suffered in some way or another, risks contributing to a counterproductive discourse.

“You have to be very careful,” says Lattimer. “Clearly the smaller minority communities, including Christians and Yezidis, are in a lot of danger. But there is a clear risk on some occasions that statements about these communities that are seen as politically or religiously motivated can actually make their problems worse.”

In 2010, there was a spate of killings of Christians in Mosul. That year, Pope Benedict spoke out about their plight, calling for Iraqi civil authorities to make “every effort to return security to the population and, in particular, to the most vulnerable religious minorities”. According to Lattimer this had the tragic effect of leading some extremist groups to step up their calls for violence against Christians. Threats can also come from the mainstream. Recently, both Shia and Sunni political parties have ramped up their rhetoric against the non-religious, in response to reports that atheism is on the rise in Iraq.

“The raising of these issues by figures seen in the Iraqi context as biased or allied with the ‘crusaders’ risks triggering more attacks against the victim group,” adds Lattimer. “It is a difficult context. It’s very important that when you are trying to seek the protection of different religious communities, that it is seen to be non-partisan and not exclusive to one particular religion. That has the best chances of being effective.” Such an approach, he suggests, would involve focusing on a human rights framework and the right to freedom of religion and non-belief.

* * *

While ISIS has been cleared out of most of the territory it held in Iraq, the scars of this time will be slow to heal – and Iraq lacks the strong state institutions required to provide security and justice to vulnerable people, or to the general population. Deep societal divisions have been entrenched and worsened by the brutality of ISIS rule and the violence of the campaign to topple them. To visit Iraq today is to visit a land of refugees, the cities and countryside dotted with camps and makeshift shelters. Many people have yet to return to their homes, staying instead in camps for the internally displaced, like the one that Dalu administers. Other Iraqis wait in camps in Turkey and Lebanon.

The challenges ahead are enormous – and are not helped by the use of the suffering of minority groups as a rhetorical device, a way for far-right groups to illustrate Muslim barbarity. After all, Middle Eastern religious minorities suffer too from a racist atmosphere that opposes asylum, supports deportations and vilifies anyone brown-skinned.

In the camp in Erbil, Dalu was assessing his limited options. “Our stories and our lives have been destroyed overnight. We have no trust in this country any more.”

He told me that he and his wife had applied for asylum through the UN’s resettlement programme. This process can take years, and places are extremely limited. (Last year, a group of Iraqi Christian refugees in Lebanon held a protest outside a UN building to complain about delays.)

“If they don’t offer us asylum anywhere, we will have to go back to Bartella,” he said, flicking through images on his phone of his ruined house. “We don’t have any other solution. Even if it kills us, we will have to go back.”