Convert, pay or die.
Iraqi Christian women at church in June. (Source)
Over the last few days, things have grown dire for Christians in Mosul, a city in northern Iraq. From a July 18th New York Times story:
By 1 p.m. on Friday almost every Christian in Mosul had heard the Sunni militants’ message — they had until noon Saturday to leave the city.
Men, women and children piled into neighbors’ cars, some begged for rides to the city limits and hoped to get taxis to the nearest Christian villages. They took nothing more than the clothes on their backs, according to several who were reached late Friday.
The order from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria came after Christians decided not to attend a meeting that ISIS had arranged for Thursday night to discuss their status.
“We were so afraid to go,” said Duraid Hikmat, an expert on minorities who had done research for years in Mosul. He fled two weeks ago to Al Qosh, a largely Christian town barely an hour away, but his extended family left on Friday.
Since 2003, when Saddam Hussein was ousted, Mosul’s Christians, one of the oldest communities of its kind in the world, had seen their numbers dwindle from over 30,000 to just a few thousand, but once ISIS swept into the city in early June, there were reports that the remaining Christians had fled.
Interviews on Friday with Christian elders and leaders suggest that in fact many had hung on, hoping for an accommodation, a way to continue the quiet practice of their faith in the city that had been their home for more than 1,700 years. Chaldeans, Assyrians and other sects, including Mandeans, whose Christianity is close to that of the Gnostics, could still be found in Iraq, and many made their home on the plains of Nineveh in the north of the country, an area mentioned in the Bible’s Book of Genesis.
Friday’s edict, however, was probably the real end. While a few scattered souls may find a way to stay in secret, the community will be gone.
A YouTube video shows ISIS taking sledgehammers to the tomb of Jonah, something that was also confirmed by Mr. Hikmat. The militants also removed the cross from St. Ephrem’s Cathedral, the seat of the Syriac Orthodox archdiocese in Mosul, and put up the black ISIS flag in its place. They also destroyed a statue of the Virgin Mary, according to Ghazwan Ilyas, the head of the Chaldean Culture Society in Mosul, who spoke by telephone on Thursday from Mosul but seemed to have left on Friday.
Yesterday, Pope Francis spoke out on the Iraqi Christians dire situation:
The pontiff in his traditional Angelus blessing on Sunday offered prayers for Iraqi Christians who “are persecuted, chased away, forced to leave their houses without out the possibility of taking anything” with them.
Christians departed Mosul this week for the largely autonomous Kurdish region after they were issued anultimatum to convert to Islam, pay a tax or face death. It’s the latest exodus of Christians from the city where communities date from the first centuries of Christianity.
From another New York Times story from yesterday, some Christians opted to convert:
… Some — just a few, and because they were not healthy enough to flee — submitted to demands that they convert to Islam to avoid being killed.
“There are five Christian families who converted to Islam because they were threatened with death,” said Younadim Kanna, a Christian and a member of Iraq’s Parliament. “They did so just to stay alive.”
Between Mosul, Gaza, and the Malaysian Airlines flight shot down in Ukraine, it has been an extremely rough weekend for innocents caught in battles not of their choosing. Please pray.