‘I didn’t go looking for Christians in Iraq; I stumbled upon them when I went to cover a U.S.-led war,” Mindy Belz, editor of World magazine, writes in her new book They Say We Are Infidels: On the Run from ISIS with Persecuted Christians in the Middle East. The fruit of many reporting trips to the region, the book chronicles what the Christians been through and the uncertain prospects for their future, given the threat of extermination and the West’s frequent indifference and inconsistent intervention.
About the persecuted, she writes: “They don’t have communities to go back to, their houses of worship have been destroyed. Thousands now are leaving, and I believe it will one day come back on the United States and the American church to have watched this region empty of Christians and to have done so little to stop it.” We talk more about them and her book. — KJL
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Have you ever been to the hospital that was bombed in Aleppo earlier this month? How did you process that news ,and what did you make of it?
Ambulances carry ammunition rather than patients, hospitals are targets rather than havens, churches have become brothels and slave-holding cells.
Mindy Belz: I have not, but I know doctors who have worked there. One of the tragedies of this war is that no civilian targets are off limits, and so very little support from outside. The doctors at al-Shifa have been working for years — since 2013 — in horrific conditions, blood on the floor, recycling medicine and bandages, and at all hours the worst civilian casualties brought in — beheaded babies, even.
It’s also emblematic of the upside-down nature of this conflict: Ambulances carry ammunition rather than patients, hospitals are targets rather than havens, churches have become brothels and slave-holding cells, and the United States — long the defender of human rights — is silent.
Lopez: You describe your travels to Iraq as a “journey to find water in the desert.” Did you?
Belz: Amazingly, yes. Arab hospitality runs deep, and I have always been welcomed, even when Iraqis otherwise felt betrayed by Americans. More specifically, I have seen the amazing capacity for the Church — even the Church undergoing persecution — to reach out and serve others, even in the midst of its being wiped out. One of the compelling stories is that in the void, where there is no large-scale, ground-level international intervention for so vast a humanitarian crisis, the churches that are not displaced are continually and steadily taking in the churches that are: families adopting families, continuous outreach to the displaced camps in the north, church groups providing displaced families with necessities but also Easter clothing — just kindness.
Lopez: How, as you saw it, did good come out of evil?
Belz: At the beginning of the Iraq war there was tension and distrust between many of Iraq’s old churches — Chaldean, Assyrian, Orthodox — and the newer Evangelical churches, which were largely seen as imports or upstarts. But in the face of a greater challenge, a common enemy, these churches have generally all come together. It’s not uncommon to see a church-aid convoy heading to an outlying village, and the people who are helping, bringing supplies, are Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant.
Lopez: What is the greatest evil there? What can be done about it? What is being done about it?
Belz: The complete and utter destruction of cities and towns by Islamic State, or ISIS, is hard to fathom. I’ve walked through cities that were taken by ISIS and then liberated by Kurdish forces; it’s beyond shocking. Everything is destroyed. Everything is lost, and keep in mind that for many families living in these towns it represents the loss of a 2,000-year or older history. These families, especially the Christians, have long prided themselves on maintaining that link to some of the earliest Christian settlements in the world.
The greatest human tragedy is the ongoing — today! — slave trade and its atrocities. Over 5,000 girls, mostly Yazidis, are still held by ISIS. Some were as young as seven years old when they were taken, now held, in some cases, for two years.
Lopez: Why do Iraqi Christians and other minorities feel so abandoned by the West?
Belz: Because we are doing so little. In Nineveh Plains you can hear the F-18s flying high overhead and see the airstrikes in the distance. We have a growing number of military advisers on the ground, but they are few and spread out. American officials are talking to officials in Baghdad and in the Kurdish north. But faced with this level of humanitarian crisis — millions have been driven from their homes, thousands subjected to atrocities, dozens of mass graves are turning up — the utter lack of ground-level response, of a mass, mobilized international intervention to take back towns and villages and to care for traumatized victims of ISIS is still shocking to Iraqis. Keep in mind, they watched the United States and others intervene in their country so long, now the silence and inaction is hard to comprehend.
Lopez: Who are “they,” and who are the “infidels,” and what can we do about it?
Belz: “They” are a string of Islamic-terrorist groups who sprang up in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion, starting with al-Qaeda in Iraq, which promised to “plant the flag of Islam” in the heart of what is a country with deep Jewish and Christian roots, in addition to the more recent Muslim heritage. Christians felt the brunt of this starting in 2004, and while parts of the country were secured by U.S. forces, their status as “infidels” — those outside the Muslim faith, deserving to die — did not change and was notably ignored by U.S. political and military leaders.
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Lopez: Why do Western leaders misunderstand Christianity in the Middle East? What can be done to change this?
Belz: The groupthink of the Western diplomatic community is to take a nonsectarian approach, to bring policies that are a-religious to perhaps the most religious part of the world. A better starting point is to recognize the religious roots — not only Shia and Sunni but Jewish, Christian, Yazidi, Sabaean-Mandaean, and a host of others. Crafting solutions that recognize and respect their religious views would go a long way toward creating an environment where the rights of minorities can be protected.
Lopez: What is the “vitality” of Christianity there, and how did it “draw” you in?
Belz: Ultimately it’s this, and it slowly dawned on me while working on the book: The Christians confronted by ISIS face-to-face and door-to-door ran, but they ran only when to stay meant giving up their faith. The sublime, nearly forgotten reality in all their hardship and loss was this: In losing everything, they held on to the one thing that mattered to them most. We in the West often approach the persecuted church with pity, but they do not need our pity. They have so much to teach us.
Lopez: Why should we care about persecuted Christians in a particular way? ISIS isn’t persecuting only them.
Belz: Many Christians as they fled were asked to give up the keys to their cars, the deeds to their property. ISIS required this. So having lost everything — houses, property, businesses, and belongings — they cannot continue to survive without outside help. They do need outside material help. Nearly every Christian I know in Iraq is living in some kind of temporary housing, and it’s now almost two years since ISIS uprooted them. I have seen good work by churches and aid groups who simply step in to assist with providing rent for displaced families. And there is trauma, that’s harder. But these families need healing, too, from the trauma they have suffered.
Lopez: Why is it important that Christians maintain a presence in the Middle East? And in Iraq and Syria specifically? What more do they need from us?
Belz: They need political leaders and church brethren in the West to acknowledge that they exist and that their presence in the Middle East historically and presently matters. They are indigenous people with a right to stay and a right to return.
Lopez: Why are the Christians you talk with not fans of the “safe haven” idea?
Belz: Many believe it would just be a larger prison, a ghetto, just a stopover on the way to extinction.
Lopez: What got you into this topic? What made you go over to such a dangerous part of the world to do this reporting?
Belz: I followed Insaf Safou, an Iraqi Christian, on my second trip to Iraq to cover the war [in 2003, and I discovered this vibrant community no one was talking about. I returned over and over to report on how the Christians were doing, and along the way they became like family to me. Their survival mattered.
Lopez: Why do you begin your book with a story from 2006?
Kidnapping robbed Christians of their safety, ransom payments robbed them of their savings, and the fear of kidnappings forced many to leave, to retreat from life.
Belz: The kidnapping of Christians is an overlooked problem and weaving the story of Odisho Yousif’s kidnapping into the early chapters of the book is a dramatic way to begin to tell their story. Kidnapping robbed Christians of their safety, ransom payments robbed them of their savings, and the fear of kidnappings forced many to leave, to retreat from life. Kidnappings became a way of blackmail, of forcing Christians out.
Lopez: You write about Karim Wasfi, a former director of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra, and his “Baghdad Mourning Melancholy.” What was that all about, why was it important, and what other beauty have you seen there?
Belz: I believe that the idea of finding beauty out of ashes is important in a place like Iraq, where war and violence have dominated for so long. Wasfi’s work is important also because it has been a way of bringing together Muslims, Christians, Yazidis, Bahai’s, and others. He feels strongly that that is something he can do through music. It’s striking that the symphony still plays, and its performances often are standing-room only.
Lopez: If your friend, translator, traveling companion Insaf could talk to people, and especially conservative policymakers in America, what might she tell them?
Belz: She would stress the importance of dignity, that humans at all levels deserve to have their dignity. It is not simply a matter of dumping pallets of food and supplies. It is a matter of restoring their dignity and treating them like humans — people who ran businesses, taught school, parented their children — who need to be restored to these roles again.
Lopez: Why is Gertrude Bell so important to you?
Belz: She was a keen observer of this world and developed a strong attachment to Iraqis during her time there. Because there are so few women doing what I’ve done in this part of the world, I’ve latched on to the writing of women like her and Freya Stark. They traveled to this ancient world when traveling alone as a woman was more difficult. They learned the language and learned about the people and helped people like me understand our wide cultural gaps. When I first was reporting in Iraq, I’d sit down to a table and someone would eventually ask me, “Does your father know you are here?” I was in my forties. Over time I realized it was a way of caring for me, and they grew to treat me like a sister.