Nicodemus Daoud Sharaf, archbishop of Mosul’s Syriac Orthodox church
ishtartv.com - economist.com
Aug
20th 2016 | ERBIL |
“THE
Lord is my shepherd,” says the psalmist, but Nicodemus Daoud Sharaf is finding
it devilishly hard to tend his flock. As archbishop of Mosul’s Syriac Orthodox
church, he has been chased out of one of Christianity’s oldest dioceses. Most
of his congregation fled when the city was conquered by the jihadists of Islamic
State (IS); now he ministers to what is left of it in Erbil, the capital of
Iraq’s Kurdish region.
Archbishop
Nicodemus says he was the last senior churchman to leave Mosul in July 2014.
Since then, he says, 32 churches in Mosul and in the surrounding plain of
Nineveh have been burnt or put to other uses. His cathedral is now a mosque
dedicated to jihad. “For the first time in the history of Christianity, there
are no Christians praying in Mosul,” he adds, weeping. “Even under the Mongol
hordes and Hulagu Khan [in the 13th century] it wasn’t so bad.”
As
the archbishop sees it, the IS takeover is the culmination of a lengthy
campaign by assorted Muslims to squeeze Christianity out of the Middle East.
During the first world war Sunni Turks and Kurds purged Anatolia of Greek,
Armenian and Syriac Christians, partly in response to the earlier expulsions of
Muslims from the Crimea and south-eastern Europe by Orthodox Christians. Since
then, he says, Sunni Arabs have done most of the tormenting. When Iraq became independent
in 1932, Christians made up 12% of its people. By the time Saddam Hussein was
ousted in 2003, they had fallen to 6%. Since America’s invasion, two-thirds of
Iraq’s remaining 1.5m Christians have left.
Though
Sunni jihadists have been in the vanguard of efforts to kill or expel
Christians, Iraq’s Shia-led establishment has hardly been friendly: the
government adorns its flag with the Islamic salute, Allahu akbar (“God is
greatest”), implicitly demoting non-Muslims. “Christian Syriacs were here first,”
says the archbishop. “But our guests took us over”
Many
of Iraq’s city centres, he adds, were once predominantly Christian—including
Erbil, his Kurdish-run haven. The Kurds, he admits, have given sanctuary what
is left of his flock. In Ankawa, a district of Erbil that has become the
Christians’ Iraqi heartland, a statue of the Virgin Mary stands tall. On Sunday
evenings Ankawa’s churches are full, mostly with people displaced by IS. A
Catholic university opened last year. The Kurdish government’s religious-affairs
ministry has departments for Christians, Yazidis and Jews. Its flag has no
Muslim symbol.
Archbishop
Nicodemus can do little more than vent his grievances on local television.
Saddam’s rule was bad, he says. So is that of Syria’s leader, Bashar al-Assad.
But the jihadists who have taken their place are worse. Iraq’s minorities were
once the glue that straddled Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic lines and held the
country together. No longer. In his father’s day, Christians would celebrate
Easter by parading through Mosul’s streets, thumping their drums. It was the
same in Damascus. Now the dwindling remnants stay indoors.
|