Ishtartv.com-
independent.co.uk
Saturday
10 October 2015
Syrian
Christians are too terrified of past kidnappings and present suicide bombings
by Isis to return to their homes in towns and villages from which the Islamist
militants have been driven. Much the same is true of other communities in
Syria, meaning that few of the 4 million Syrian refugees now outside the
country and the 7 million within it are ever likely to go home.
Isis has
adopted a strategy of ensuring that even where it is defeated and forced to
retreat, it can ensure that there is a state of terror and permanent insecurity
in the territory from which it has withdrawn. One can see the results of this
process clearly in the town of Tal Tamir and nearby villages on the Khabur
river in north-east Syria, where there were once large Assyrian Christian
populations and which were seized by Isis at the start of the year. These
places were recaptured by the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in
the early summer but they remain desolate and uninhabited.
It
has been months since there was any fighting in Tal Tamir, and it is undamaged
compared to many Syrian cities, but it has become a ghost town with empty
streets, boarded up houses and overgrown bushes in gardens. We had been
directed in Qamishli, the largest city in this Kurdish-controlled part of
Syria, to seek out the local Christian militia and, with some difficulty, we
found their headquarters in an abandoned villa.
“I
was told you were coming, but not to tell you anything,” said the local
Christian commander. But there probably was not much to tell, since there were
only a few militiamen, mostly without weapons, in the villa which had no
furniture aside from a rusty metal table and some chairs. He pointed us vaguely
in the direction of another militia headquarters that turned out to be closed.
The Kurdish YPG likes to give the impression that it has non-Kurdish allies,
but in practice does not tolerate independent militias.
In searching
for elusive Christian militiamen, we met Jan Abraham, an Assyrian Christian and
the mayor of a small village called Tal Maghas, where he says that “out of 50
families which fled my village in February when Isis advanced only three
of them have returned. In Tal Tamir itself, there used to be between 15,000 and
20,000 people, but today this is down to about 1,000.” He says that the
Christians have mostly sought sanctuary in Lebanon, Turkey, Germany and Sweden.
“Out
of 50 families which fled my village in February when Isis advanced only
three of them have returned”
Jan
Abraham, an Assyrian Christian
Mr
Abraham, a cheery confident man aged 54, still has a job in the Agricultural
Bank in Tal Tamir, though most of his customers have left. He says that he
advises people to come back, but “they are too afraid of Daesh [Isis].” And
they have reason to fear since their villages have been largely destroyed and
between 200 and 220 Assyrian Christians, part of a community that sought refuge
in Syria after being massacred in Iraq in 1933, were abducted by Isis in
February and have still not been released, aside from a few old people. “We
don’t know where they are,” says Mr Abraham. Last week Isis released a
video showing three Assyrian captives being executed.
Syrians
often begin conversations by saying their neighbourhood is safe and only
gradually confess that this security has its limitations. Mr Abraham was no
exception and, after 10 minutes, he revealed that a woman suicide bomber from
Isis had been detected the previous week in Tal Tamir trying to enter a
market, though she had been detained before she could blow herself up. She had
been wearing traditional long Arab robes and pretending to be pregnant to
conceal the explosives around her waist. Local people were suspicious of her
because they thought she did not walk like a pregnant woman, but the
non-Kurdish militiamen were all male and could not search her. This did not
apply to the YPG fighters, many of whom are women, who searched the suspect and
prevented her detonating her bomb.
Isis is
pursuing the same tactics across Kurdish-controlled north Syria where the
Islamist militants have suffered their most serious military defeats this year
at the hands of YPG ground forces backed by intense United States bombing. The
YPG broke Isis’s long siege of Kobani in January, though 70 per cent of the
city was pulverised by US bombs and missiles, and the Kurdish fighters have
since advanced to the Euphrates. Isis lost an important border crossing
with Turkey at Tal Abyad in June and failed in an attempt to seize Hasaka city.
Yet the front line between Isis and the YPG is long and porous, so it is
impossible to defend against infiltrators. Pervasive fear that Isis has
“sleeper cells” in every Sunni Arab community stokes paranoid suspicions and
deepens hostility between Arab and Kurd.
North-east
Syria is probably the safest part of the country, apart from the cities of the
Mediterranean coast, but among the remaining Christians there is a feeling that
the region has become too dangerous to live in. Mr Abraham says that he is
advising people to return, but he admits that he himself “is waiting for a job
contract in Germany or Sweden”. His son is an electrician in Germany and his
wife and daughters are in Lebanon, though conditions are so bad there that they
might return to Syria at least temporarily.