By the time President Barack Obama signed the Near East and South Central Asia Religious Freedom Act last August, the issue for many religious minorities was not about “freedom” but survival, and the situation has only worsened since then. By August, ISIS had already issued a warning to Iraq’s Christian population that they could convert, pay extra taxes, or be killed. In the seven months since the act was passed, ISIS has massacred and enslaved thousands of adherents of the ancient Yazidi faith, razed villages and killed hundreds who belong to the Shabak ethno-religious minority group, destroyed a 7th Century Greek Orthodox Church in the Iraqi city of Tikrit, bombed an Armenian church and genocide memorial in Dair Alzour, Syria, and beheaded 21 Coptic Christian Egyptians.
Before the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the country was home to 1.5 million Christians. The vast majority of them have now left their homes for in Iraqi Kurdistan or else countries overseas. Hundreds of thousands of Christians in Syria fled the country as it after it slipped into civil war four years ago.
“Some of the oldest Christian communities in the world are disappearing in the very lands where their faith was born and first took root,” a Center for American Progress report on the plight of Christians in the Middle East released on Thursday stated. “During the past decade, Christians around the Middle East have been subject to vicious murders at the hands of terrorist groups, forced out of their ancestral lands by civil wars, suffered societal intolerance fomented by Islamist groups, and subjected to institutional discrimination found in the legal codes and official practices of many Middle Eastern countries.”
At a panel discussion marking the release of the report, Elizabeth H. Prodromou, a professor of conflict resolution at Tufts University, noted that Christians in the Middle East have faced hardships for far longer than a decade.
“What we’re talking about is really a century-long process, since the establishment of states in the region, of Christian decline and elimination of the presence of Christians,” she said, and explained that it’s not just Christian communities that face persecution, but also what she called the “institutional expressions that they were once there and they hope to continue to be there.”
ISIS’ reign of of terror on Christian sites such as its destruction of tomb of the Biblical prophet Jonah in July and its destruction of ancient Assyrian relics in Mosul, Iraq point to its deliberate attempt to wipe away the region’s diverse religious traditions.
Christians make up a sizable minority across the Middle East — a region that once had a great deal of religious diversity. As recent news reports of attacks on Yazidis and Shabaks underline, they are not the only minority group that has had to deal with real threats to their existence in recent years.
Still, Prodromou says blows to the Middle East’s Christian population are often emblematic of a broader climate of religious intolerance.
“As a general observation for our foreign policy, this is an important test case for us when it comes to the region because as Christians have gone, so are other small, vulnerable minorities going, and I don’t think we can really [afford to] fail to grasp that,” she said.
The Obama administration may not be moving quickly enough to address the threats that could utterly eviscerate religious minority groups in the region. The act Obama signed in August created a new post to contend with just these issues, but seven months later, no one has been appointed to serve as the Special Envoy to Promote Freedom of Religious Minorities in the Middle East.
Paul Salem of the Middle East Institute says a history of marginalization has only compounded the difficulties faced by religious minorities. “Once ignored politically, they will be devastated,” he said. “In a civil war, either there need to be hard-protections — no-fly zones, safe zones — for people without the ability to protect themselves, or some mechanism for them to defend themselves.”
The National Defense Authorization Act which was signed into law in December, allocated as much as $1.6 billion to support those battling head-to-head with ISIS.
The funds are specifically geared to aid threatened Christian communities in Iraq, through “local forces that are committed to protecting highly vulnerable ethnic and religious minority communities in the Nineveh Plain and elsewhere.”
Hundreds of Iraqi Christians are now fighting back against the group dead set on obliterating their communities and holy sites from the region.
“No one has protected the minorities, and no one will in the future,” Kaldo Oghanna, an Assyrian Christian who helped train fellow Christians to combat ISIS told the Wall Street Journal.
He and many other Christians believe that the Islamist militant group isn’t their only enemy, but that the sharp sectarian divides will leave them vulnerable even if ISIS is defeated.
While the plight of Christians and other religious minorities might seem more bleak than ever with the rise of ISIS, Paul Salem says it could also provide for “new opportunities” to build the sort of coalitions that will foster lasting empowerment for them.
“There’s new opportunities. There’s many in the Muslim mainstream now who value an alliance with Christians, particularly as a bulwark against their own Islamic radicals… There’s a new logic to a cross-sectarian coalition in some cases,” he said.