The tragic exodus of Iraq's Christians

Above Fr. Lallou’s there is a plaque with words from St. Matthew in Arabic script. “Therefore go and makes disciples of all Nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” But the Assyrian Church here is not triumphant; it has been on the defensive for decades. Since the 1990s, hostility from the government of Saddam Hussein—and, since his fall, sectarian killings and bombings and an increasingly aggressive Islamist political culture—have forced two-thirds of Iraq’s Christian to flee overseas, slashing the population from 1.2 million to 300,000.

The Nineveh plains, the original Assyrian heartland, where Christians speak Assyrian as their first language and Arabic their second, has been also experienced an exodus despite Christian leaders earmarking the strip of land sandwiched between Mosul and Iraqi Kurdistan as a possible place of refuge when sectarian attacks in Basra and Baghdad mounted after the American invasion. Since 2003, Christian families started to arrive from the south looking to settle on extended family holdings, but many moved on because of the depressed economy, partly a consequence of the Nineveh plains remaining disputed territory between the Iraq government and the Kurds. The Christian exodus, though, started during the Iran-Iraq war because many locals had been trading with Iran and their businesses collapsed during the conflict.