Today, Explained - Crisis of faith

Episode Date: June 5, 2019

Iraq’s Christian population has been fleeing the country en masse. The United States wants to help, so long as they don’t come here. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Getquip.com slash explained is the website. The product is the Quip electric toothbrush. It starts at just $25 and your first set of refills is free. They've got everything from gold Quips to silver Quips to Quips for the whole family to kids Quips. It'll blow your mind. G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash explained. There is no protection, no supporting the people being killed Why we are living in our country and we be killed We would like to live The Chaldean community is one of the oldest in Iraq. This population has literally thousands of years of history,

even predating Christianity, in this specific area of the world. And Chaldean Christians have been in northern Iraq since the very first days of Christianity. And there's a very real possibility that gets more real with every passing year that this is the end of their story in this land and in this place. Since the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq's Christian population has dropped from about 1.2 million to under 250,000. That's an 80% drop in under two decades. They lost our dignity here. I'm sorry to say that. We don't have dignity in our country. This population is representative of a larger phenomenon that's happening in Iraq, happening in the Middle East,

which is these religious minorities are getting pushed out of their historic homes. And that is a huge threat to the democracy and stable future of these countries in the region. Emma Green, you write about religion for the Atlantic. What's the origin story of Iraq's Christians? So some of Iraq's Christians claim to have been there for literally 5,000 years. This is before Christianity, obviously. They identify with roughly an Assyrian heritage, this sort of national peoplehood that has long, long roots in this region. The population is more complicated than that. There have been Christians who have come

from Turkey, who have come from Syria, who have come from Iran, who have ended up in Iraq. And also the Christians who are now populating that northern part of Iraq, the Nineveh Plain, this sort of epic scene from the Bible that might ring a bell even to people who don't know Iraq's territory very well, those Christians have also emigrated from a lot of other places in Iraq, having been pushed out of the more southern parts of the country by conflict and war. How do you recognize an Iraqi Christian from an Iraqi agnostic, from an Iraqi Muslim? So in part, it's language. There's a specific dialect of Aramaic that these specific Christians in the Nineveh Plain speak. Muslims don't speak that.

I've also heard things like people's names and even the way that they dress could be big tells. Christian women will wear jeans or, you know, T-shirts. They don't cover their hair in the way that a Muslim woman might. And that just underscores an aspect of the Christianity here that I found so fascinating, which is it's not just a belief system that you opt into. It's also who you are. It's your identity. It's your family. It's your inheritance. It's your house. It's your town. It's the very specific swath of land that they have been in for many thousands of years. And was there a time where things were just really good for

Iraq's Christian population, where they were thriving? So some people told me stories about when they were growing up, say in the 70s, when there was relative peace and stability and Christians could get along with their Muslim neighbors and they lived in their towns and Muslims lived in their towns and every other minority lived in their own towns and everybody basically got along. Certainly under Saddam Hussein, there was not any semblance of religious liberty and freedom the way that we think about it in the United States. But for Christians, at least, there was semblance of stability. One of Saddam's closest advisors was Christian. He, in general, created a sense of protection or stability for the Christian population there. And after the U.S. invasion, it just really started to unwind.

We will tear down the apparatus of terror, and we will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free. The period after the U.S. invasion was one of significant shifts in terms of the governance structure of Iraq. And when the constitution was being written, there were provisions that were put in that specifically protected the status of religious minorities in the country. But nevertheless, it says in the constitution that Islam is the religion in Iraq and has several provisions that create special status or preferred status for Muslims.

Laws around things like ID cards that specifically call out people based on their identity, marriage across lines of religion. But also in those years after the invasion, especially around 2006, 2007, 2008, there were a wave of attacks on churches and specific Christian populations. The twisted wreckage in the street was a reminder of the fighting that had raged the day before, when Iraqi security forces had stormed the compound of the Catholic Church,

where militants had taken an entire congregation hostage for hours. Inside, the whole room bore the scars. There were bullet holes through the paintings on the walls, bloodstains on the floor, and some of the furniture was upended. More than 50 people were killed, two of them priests. And so it was not just sort of subtle everyday life questions about security. It was also a real fear of violence and being targeted specifically because they were Christian. Everybody in Iraq, all the religious minorities, were negatively affected by the vacuum of power that was created by the U.S. destabilization of the regime in Iraq. And then the lack of a sort of a certain future and a secure future that came in the wake of that.

And after all that comes ISIS. Iraq's largest Christian city now seized by ISIS militants. Tens of thousands of Christians are now fleeing for their lives. In the summer of 2014, they started moving across the Nineveh plain. And eventually that August, they took several of the towns that I looked at. One of them was called Kramlis. And it was this very dramatic thing. The townspeople were ringing the bell in the main church, trying to tell everybody to get out. Everybody in the middle of the night was packing up all of their stuff, trying to get

in their cars, some people moving on foot, moving towards Erbil, which is the capital city in the Kurdish region in northern Iraq. And they thought that maybe this would be temporary. Maybe it would be a couple of days. They trusted the militia forces that were trying to secure that area to protect them. And ultimately what ended up happening is an occupation of the Nineveh Plain by ISIS that lasted for months and months and months. And it took quite a long time for Iraqi security forces to actually displace ISIS to push them out of the Nineveh Plain and finally out of Mosul. And since then, it's really been a big question both whether these populations are going to be able to rebuild their houses and rebuild their towns, which were destroyed by ISIS in some cases, burned down, set on fire. The main church I saw had been potentially exploded by C4.

So huge, huge damage. But also it's a huge question whether there's going to be another ISIS. They're not sure with these geopolitical tensions that are now rising between Iraq and Iran whether they're once again going to be caught in the middle of this sort of broad conflict. I know you've spoken with Iraqi Christians in your reporting, specifically Iraqi Catholics. Do they want to go back? So this family that I met, it was pretty extraordinary. They went to the United States just literally weeks before ISIS invaded their hometown. In that moment when ISIS was taking over their town, they were trying to reach the rest of their siblings who were still in their hometown. They were trying to figure out what was actually happening. And they have expressed so much sadness at not being able to

be with people for Easter, for Christmas. The mom who I talked to, her name is Catherine, she talked about her kitchen, how much she missed cooking and gossiping, how much she missed the smells of her hometown, how it sounded at holiday time. But also, they wonder whether there's going to be another moment like that ISIS invasion. They wonder whether there really is a secure future. So there are several senses in which they would love to go back, but they don't think it's possible. And they, in fact, told me that they think everybody should leave Iraq because they don't think it's safe. Have you heard the flip side of that, that going back to Iraq and

maintaining this Christian community there is an imperative? So the brother of Catherine, his name is Thabit. He's a priest who lives in this town of Karamalis in the Nineveh Plain. And he is the exact opposite. He does make this argument that it is so important for Christians to be in the Nineveh Plain, to stay in their homeland, to rebuild, to repopulate, to be the future of Iraq. And he thinks this in part because he sees the Christians as the original people of Iraq. He told me stories about the history of the people there. He was the one who was trying to indicate

the aqueducts and all of the connection to the ancient lands, the ancient monasteries all over this region of Iraq. The sad thing though, and I think again, sort of the tension that's lying in all of this, is he's a powerful priest who has access to resources and is very influential in his town. And he hasn't even been able to persuade his own siblings to stay. Would you say the United States is to blame for this picture right now? I think it's far too simplistic to blame the United States. I think that it is too reductive to say that Saddam was great and everything that came after the U.S. invasion was terrible because, of course, that's not the case. Saddam Hussein committed genocide, essentially,

against Kurdish people in the north in Iraq in the 1980s. And this was not a great, wonderful time of liberty for all in Iraq. And I would say that the situation that was created by the U.S. invasion did create a lot of instability. There's an argument to be made that it opened the way for ISIS to take shape, to take advantage of the vacuum of power. But I would say that in general, I'm trying to look at the broad picture here, this arc of history that's not just about the last 10 or 20 years, but really spans a century. It has just become more and more impossible for these historic groups to stay in their homes.

The situation is very different in Turkey or in Egypt or in Syria, certainly, but there are also echoes there that those populations are facing severe difficulties and systemic discrimination. So I think there are a lot of factors here that go beyond the U.S. involvement, although certainly that's part of the story. Coming up next on the show, it looks like the United States will throw just about any amount of money at this problem. Just don't ask to come over here. Good morning. Tim from Brooklyn in the morning. Sean in the morning.

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Neighborhood cat. Cats are always wondering, why can't I brush my teeth? Why can't I go to getcrypt.com slash cat? Emma, what is the United States doing right now for Iraq's Christian population? So from the early days of his campaign, President Trump specifically singled out Christians in the Middle East as a population he, where they're, if you're Christian, they're chopping off heads. You look at the different places and Christianity, it's under siege. Under the leadership of Vice President Pence, who has been paying very close attention to this issue and has this as a sort of portfolio in his list of duties, there has been a huge boost in USAID dollars to this region. Just as important as driving ISIS out of existence is making sure that we provide aid and comfort

to those who have suffered so much loss and grief and ensure that they can avail themselves, they can avail themselves of their right to return. Somebody in the State Department who spoke with me on background talked about this being an unprecedented surge of money that's specifically focused on religious minorities in a specific region of land. And so the question is, why have these groups over and above all of the many, many groups that the U.S. tries to take care of, the regions that the U.S. is involved with in a developmental perspective, why is it that this group has been the source of such focus? northern Iraq gives us a window into the Trump administration's worldview where they imagine religious liberty and the freedom of religious minorities as being this crucial tester of democracy and a sort of last bulwark of stability in the face of a real possibility of sort of

violence and authoritarian regimes that are hostile to the U.S. taking over that part of the world. And so they think it's important to invest in these populations to secure them and stabilize them. And we're talking about over like a hundred million dollars of aid here. Do you know where that money's going? So we know that that has gone to projects around infrastructure and housing. So this is everything from schools and hospitals to the houses that people live in in these towns. It's a mix of private and public funding. And basically what they're focused on is stabilization. They're trying to create that sense of stability for people to be able to come home and know that they can make a life here. What about if all of these Christians from Iraq want to come to the United States?

How does the Trump administration deal with that? So on the one hand, they've given all this money, they've paid all of this attention, they've made speeches about it, talked about it in interviews. But they also pair that with this very hardline stance against immigration and the intake of refugees. One of the big criticisms of the Obama administration was that they privileged other types of refugees over and above Christians. But actually, the number of Christians from Iraq admitted to the United States during the Trump administration has dropped by 98%. State Department data tells us that 23 Iraqi Christians were admitted to the United States in all of 2018, and that's compared to 2,000 people in 2016. And I think this really speaks to how the Trump administration views the world. They're willing on a limited basis to use their microphones

and their dollars to try to stabilize certain populations, especially where they see this issue of fundamental injustice. I think they really do earnestly care about the persecution of religious minorities and the maintenance of religious liberty in the Middle East. I talk to a lot of earnest Trump administration officials, but I also think that at the same time, they don't think it's the United States' responsibility to open its arms and welcome in anybody from these regions who has no place else to go. Is it because they're brown, Emma?

I wouldn't be able to speculate on that. I think probably what you're seeing here is two different arms of government thinking and operating in two different ways with two different kinds of philosophies. We've seen across the Trump administration's policies that they do not want high levels of immigration or intake of refugees. We saw this in the ban on Muslim majority countries that was issued very early on in the Trump administration. And so the irony here, I think, is that instead of giving special treatment to Christians, which is what some advocates feared would happen when Trump took office, they've just mixed Christians in with everybody else. They don't want immigration or refugees, period.

And Christians are part of that shutdown, part of the dropping of that wall. This obviously isn't the only humanitarian crisis in the Middle East. It isn't even the worst humanitarian crisis in the Middle East. How do we think of this one next to starvation in Yemen or torture prisons in Syria? You know, that's a great question because it kind of gets to the fundamental moral quandary of what it means for the United States to pay selective attention and give selective humanitarian goodwill across the globe. I talked to a person in the State Department who was calling out the aid that's being given to religious

minorities in northern Iraq as being unprecedented and really remarkable and very moving in a lot of ways, but also pointed out that maybe the U.S. needs to put those resources elsewhere in the world, that there are other religious minorities who are going through crises that are just as dire or even more acute at this moment in time. And so I do think this is a really valid question to ask, which is why do these people deserve our help more than any other? I think there's one aspect of this, which is the U.S. has a long-term relationship with Iraq and is in some part responsible for the conditions on the ground in Iraq today. And so one could argue that we as a country have a responsibility to see this through, that we got ourselves entangled in this endless ground war that has been enormously destructive for Iraq and for U.S.

troops, and that we have to follow through on the consequences of that, including trying to make sure that people who have been the casualties of that instability, making sure that they can put their lives back together. The other argument I would say is that the way religious liberty is a test for democracy, it's a test for the ability of a regime, the ability of a culture to be pluralistic, to be tolerant, to have these rules and norms in place that allow people of difference to live side by side. And so you could argue that the Christians of the Nineveh Plain, they're just one small case study, but they are an important one because they are a bellwether for where their country is going, for where the region is going. They are a signal of whether or not there's capacity in these places to actually have that kind of pluralism and tolerance and democracy. Emma Green is a writer on staff at The Atlantic. She writes about religion, politics, and culture. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. Thank you. Thanks to Quip for supporting the show today.

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