The New Exodus: Christians Flee ISIS in the Middle East

By Janine di Giovanni and Conor Gaffey

Before jihadists overran this mountain town in 2013, Maaloula was one of the oldest Christian communities in Syria, where Western Aramaic—the language of Jesus Christ—is still spoken. It was also a place of profound peace, where Sunni and Shiite Muslim residents, along with their Christian neighbors, forged a pact early in the war to avoid the sectarian conflict ripping their country apart. “We decided that even if the mountains around us were exploding with fighting, we would not go to war,” Mahmoud Diab, a Sunni imam, told Newsweek in 2012. “It’s a sectarian war, but the fact is, there is no war here in Maaloula. In this town, we are not defined by religion. We all know each other. Everyone is a Christian, and everyone is Muslim.”

Tolerance had been a tradition in Maaloula since St. Takla—the daughter of a pagan prince and an early disciple (and possibly wife) of St. Paul—fled to these mountains in the first century. She was escaping soldiers sent by her father, who was threatening to kill her for her ardent faith in her adopted religion. St. Takla was exhausted and, finding her way blocked by the sharp, rocky sides of a mountain, fell on her knees in desperate prayer. Legend has it the mountains parted, and she escaped. Maaloula means entrance in Aramaic. For centuries, Christians and Muslims have come here to pray for miracles, but the residents of Maaloula weren’t blind to the dangers that swirled around them when I visited on several occasions in 2012 and 2013. “I am afraid of the kind of people who will come here,” said Antoinette Nasrallah, a Syrian-American, originally from Miami, who owned a café in the center of town. “I am afraid of Salafists.”

Still, an ancient way of life prevailed in the convents and monasteries of Maaloula, set amid apricot trees that attracted songbirds.

The idyll was shattered on September 4, 2013, when a Jordanian suicide bomber exploded a truck at a Syrian army checkpoint at the entrance of the town. Eight soldiers were killed. Rebel opposition soldiers and jihadists fighting against Syrian President Bashar Assad attacked, and the battle of Maaloula, a UNESCO-protected town, had begun. The Syrian army led a counterattack two days later, regaining control, but the fighting continued. The rebels again took the town and this time burned down churches and began to drive out Christian residents.

At that point, nearly the entire population of Maaloula fled. Some went to Beirut, an unfortunate reminder of the gruesome slogan chanted by opposition members at rallies from the beginning of the conflict: “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the coffin.”

The Syrian government eventually took back Maaloula, but in November 2013 more opposition forces—including the jihadist Jabhat al-Nusra (the Al-Qaeda franchise in Syria)—attacked. They kidnapped 12 nuns from the monastery to exchange for their captured fighters.

For nearly six months, the ancient town was again under siege until April 14, 2014, when the Syrian army—with the help of Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia—once more took control of Maaloula.

Recalling the assault by jihadists, 62-year-old Adnan Nasrallah told the Arabic daily newspaper Al Akbar: “I saw people wearing al-Nusra headbands who started shooting at crosses,” adding that one of them “put a pistol to the head of my neighbor and forced him to convert to Islam by obliging him to repeat, ‘There is no God but God.’

“Afterwards they joked, ‘He’s one of ours now.’”

The Syrian army still controls most of Maaloula, but only around 150 Christian families have returned. Many houses have been gutted by fires, and the churches and monasteries are damaged from the fighting.

As the season of Lent and abstinence leading up to Easter began in Maaloula in February, the faithful few gathered to pray. But they are no longer praying for cures for ailments or for a profitable harvest from their fields. Now they are praying for survival, because they know hundreds of their fellow Christians have been kidnapped and murdered by ISIS.

Despite this, they refuse to flee, because Syria is their country, their home. Mahmoud Diab, the imam, has left the town, but Antoinette Nasrallah is still in Maaloula. When I spoke to her by telephone a few weeks before Easter, she said the reason was simple: “It has to do with history.”

IN THE NAME OF GOD

Christians are only one of the many religious groups in Iraq and Syria that have suffered atrocities at the hands of ISIS, other armed groups and the Assad regime. Many more Muslims have been killed or driven from their homes, but ISIS has repeatedly trumpeted its attacks on Christians, whom it often refers to as “crusaders,” as part of a holy war it claims to be fighting in the name of Islam.

These latest horrors build on the prejudice, discrimination and oppression that over the past few decades have steadily reduced the proportion of Christians in the Middle East from around 20 percent at the start of the 20th century to around 5 percent now. Less than 1 percent of the world’s more than 2 billion Christians live in the Middle East, and there are fears that number could dwindle even further.

“Some of the oldest Christian communities in the world are disappearing in the very lands where their faith was born and first took root,” says the Center for American Progress in a report published in March. After the recent atrocities by ISIS, it says, “Christians have migrated from the region in increasing numbers, which is part of a longer-term exodus related to violence, persecution, and lack of economic opportunities stretching back decades.”

Solid numbers on population shifts in Iraq and Syria and on Christian casualties are hard to get because of the chaos in the region. Millions of people of various religions have fled, including nearly 4 million Syrian refugees now living in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq. Another 6.5 million Syrians are internally displaced—meaning half of the country’s pre-war population of around 20 million has been forced from their homes. A European Parliament resolution in March condemning attacks on Christians and other minorities said more than 700,000 Syrian Christians were among those who have fled the country. Before 2011, the Christian population there was estimated to be around 1.1 million.

In Iraq, this latest round of Christian persecution started with the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and the sectarian violence that followed. The pre-2003 Christian population may have been as high as 1.4 million. Now estimates put it between 260,000 and 350,000. Many Iraqi Christians moved to safer regions in the north under Kurdish control, but now ISIS is threatening them there too.

Reports of atrocities against Christians, as well as the ransacking of shrines such as the tomb of Jonah in Mosul last July, have sparked dire predictions from the likes of Britain’s Prince Charles, who said in February he feared there would be “very, very few” Christians left in the Middle East, according to The New York Times. A few Westerners have even joined Christian militias to defend their faith.

The plight of Christians in the Middle East varies greatly from country to country, but the news is mostly bad. In Lebanon, for example, Christians make up around 38 percent of the population and play a powerful role in politics (though many fled during the 1975-1990 civil war). In Jordan, there are not many Christians, but they are guaranteed some seats in Parliament and generally live in safety, and the country has become a relatively safe haven for Christian refugees. In Israel and the Palestinian territories, the small Christian populations are generally not targeted for violence, but they endure the same hardships as their neighbors who are also caught in the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

http://www.newsweek.com/2015/04/03/new-exodus-christians-flee-isis-middle-east-316785.html