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Local Iraqi Americans Fear for Christians Under Brutal Attack in Iraq
For weeks, Bashar Bakoz of Waterford pleaded with his parents over the phone to flee their hometown of Qaraqosh, a Christian town in northern Iraq. With the radical Islam group ISIS on the march, he said it was too dangerous for them to stay.
But his mom stubbornly resisted; her husband has some heart problems and they didn’t want to leave their beloved town, a place to which many Iraqi Americans in metro Detroit have ties.
Last week, they finally left for Erbil, a Kurdish city with military protection. The very next day, ISIS overran their hometown, which is mostly Christian.
ISIS has reportedly killed thousands of military prisoners and civilians in its drive to establish an Islamic state in Iraq and Syria, although most of the reports cannot be independently verified. Thousands of Iraqis have fled their homes, fearing retribution and violent persecution from ISIS militants.
On Friday, the U.S. began limited air strikes against ISIS convoys, but Iraqi-Americans wonder whether that will be enough to protect the country’s minorities in the long term.
“There’s no future for Christians in Iraq anymore,” said Bashar Bakoz, 46, an immigrant from Iraq who grew up in Qaraqosh. ISIS “is growing like crazy.”
Bakoz’s fears are felt by thousands of Iraqi-American Christians in metro Detroit who are increasingly worried about the future of their family, friends and brethren in Iraq, where they are a minority. Amid reports of mass killings and forced conversions to Islam, they believe ISIS is committing genocide against Christians in Iraq.
“It’s like the modern-day holocaust. … It’s Christian genocide,” said Auday Arabo of West Bloomfield, who attended a recent White House meeting intended to pressure the Obama administration to take action. “It’s ethnic cleansing.”
As people who speak Aramaic — the language that Jesus spoke — Iraqi Christians take pride in being one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. But as the militants with the Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS, advance in heavily Christian areas, some fear this could be the end of their long history in Iraq.
There are about 64,000 Iraqi-Americans in Michigan, more than half of them Christian, one of the biggest communities in the U.S., according to U.S. Census figures.
Many local Chaldeans, Syriacs and Assyrians — the three main Iraqi Christian groups — have stories of family members forced to flee in recent weeks, leaving behind their homes and bank accounts, hiking long distances despite health problems and old age. Some left so quickly they were barefoot.
This summer, ISIS has taken over Mosul and surrounding villages where Christians had lived in significant numbers. In Mosul alone, they’ve destroyed or converted all of the city’s 45 Christian institutions, according to an Assyrian news agency.
The most vulnerable
The extremists are telling people to convert to Islam or be killed, said the Rev. Manuel Boji, a Sterling Heights pastor who is vicar general for the Chaldean diocese in the eastern half of the U.S.
In some cases, they’re telling Christians they will be allowed to live if they follow their interpretation of Islamic law and pay an extra tax known as jizya, but even after agreeing to do this, some Christians are still being killed, he said.
“They’re picking on the most vulnerable,” sighed Boji after a meeting inside Mother of God Chaldean Church to discuss relief efforts. “You can see the extinction of Christianity in the region on the horizon.”
He gazed at a photo on his cell phone texted to him by a friend. It shows that the flag of ISIS has replaced the Christian cross on the bell tower of his hometown church in Tel Keppe, Iraq.
ISIS fighters, who are Sunni extremists, also are targeting Shia Muslims and minority religious groups, such as Mandeans, and even moderate Sunnis.
Bakoz manages a pizza and sub shop, but he has been consumed with what’s going on in Iraq, where he has more than 50 family members and relatives. He said he has lost 10 pounds over the past two months and breaks down crying when he hears about the horrors.
“Yesterday, I received 25 calls,” he said. “They’re saying: ‘Please, we need some help.’ ”
Inside St. Toma Syriac Catholic Church in Farmington Hills on Thursday, Bakoz viewed on his laptop news reports from Middle Eastern TV stations about the plight of Iraq’s minorities. In one report, he spotted his cousin talking to a reporter after fleeing Qaraqosh.
A 14-month-old baby in his arms, his cousin told the reporter: “We don’t have a place to sleep.”
Bakoz then flipped through photos of Iraqi minorities recently killed by ISIS, including children, women and men.
“They killed this guy because he owned a liquor shop,” he said, pointing to one.
Bakoz and other Iraqi-American minorities say the U.S. should help out, especially since the U.S. handling of the Iraq war has led, they said, to the problems in Iraq. They said Christians in Iraq were generally safe and got along with their Muslim neighbors before the 2003 Iraq war.
“They broke it, they should fix it,” Iraqi immigrant Afrim Bunni, 67, of Washington Township said of the U.S.
Protect minorities
In recent weeks, Iraqi-American Christians have increased ongoing efforts to persuade U.S. officials to help protect minorities in Iraq.
Over the years, Iraqi-American Christians have complained that U.S. officials have been indifferent to their concerns. They’ve warned for years about the possible extinction of Christianity in Iraq because of religious extremists, but got little response. At St. Toma, Bakoz pointed to a large poster with the photos of dozens of Iraqi Christians killed in a church in Iraq in 2010.
On July 31, a group of about eight Iraqi-American Christian leaders, half from metro Detroit, met in the White House with Ben Rhodes, a top aide to President Barack Obama who is deputy national security adviser for Strategic Communications. In addition, House Speaker John Boehner and 10 other members of Congress met with the group.
The next day, the White House released a statement saying it condemned the Islamic state’s “ongoing attacks on the Christian and minority communities in northern Iraq and the group’s systematic destruction of religious sites.”
“The United States remains committed to helping all of Iraq’s diverse communities, including Christians, Sabean-Mandaeans, Shabak and Yezidis,” read the statement.
Arabo of West Bloomfield, one of the Chaldean leaders who met with Rhodes, was pleased with the response, but says the U.S. needs to help out more, or at least make it easier for Chaldeans to help out with sending relief supplies.
The White House has put some of the blame on the current Iraqi government, led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, but local Chaldeans say the problem is beyond him. They said Thursday’s delivery by the U.S. of some aid is a good start, but they question whether the Obama administration is committed to continue helping them survive.
They say that stopping ISIS is not only good for Iraqi minorities, but U.S. strategic interests, saying that ISIS members could one day attack the U.S.
“The evil is spreading,” Arabo said. “If we don’t do something about these people who hate America, we don’t know what will happen.”
Blood on our hands
At least four rallies have been held in metro Detroit over the past two weeks, including one outside the federal building in downtown Detroit, where protesters chanted: “Obama, Where are you? Iraqi people need you” and “Down, ISIS, down,” showed a video posted by the Michigan Catholic.
The next day, on Aug 1, about 1,000 walked around Mother of God Chaldean Church in Southfield, carrying a large cross to symbolize the suffering of Jesus and of Christians in Iraq.
The Rev. Frank Kalabat, the newly installed bishop of the Chaldean diocese in the eastern half of the U.S., told the crowd that despite the intense hatred toward Iraq’s minorities, they should not hate back.
“Hatred is never from God,” Kalabat explained later to the Free Press. He said that “for humanity’s sake,” the U.S. and international community need to help out. “The blood of these people is going to be on our hands if we don’t do something immediately.”
For Boji, seeing the flag of ISIS on his old church in Tel Keif, a town many in metro Detroit have ties to, left him speechless.
“I don’t have any words” to describe what I’m feeling, he said. He recalls spending hot summer days sleeping on the church roof while growing up.
“Our house used to be across from it,” he said.
Boji has read in history books about the persecution that Christians in the Middle East have faced over the centuries, but “I never thought I would see it in my lifetime.”
Bakoz said it’s unlikely his parents will ever return to their hometown. His parents are both retired educators who devoted their lives to trying to improve Iraq, dreaming of a better future.
“My dad worked 40 years as a teacher, my mom was a principal in an elementary school,” Bakoz said. “(ISIS) destroyed that dream.”