Iraq – “Exodus”

“I was in Qaraqosh, in my house before the ISIS came. Before they sent us by trucks to the Erbil border, they hit us. They got a long beard. And they said: this is our last warning to you. If we see you again you will be killed or if you convert to Muslim, you can stay”.

Fr. Douglas Al-Bazi

With the coalition led invasion of Iraq in 2003, followed by the 2014 attacks by ISIS dedicated to eradicating Christians and other minorities in northern Iraq, the number of Christians has fallen from 1.2 million to less than 300.000 today. This prompted both the European Union and the US State Department to declare Christians and other minorities victims of Genocide. With the liberation from ISIS of Mosul and the approximately 12 Christian villages in the Nineveh Plains, those remaining Iraqi Christian IDP’s are slowly returning to their homes. Many questions about their future remain unanswered.

Since 2014, Aid to the Church in Need has been at the forefront contributing almost US$48 million for emergency relief projects: rental housing, education, food and the livelihoods of displaced persons, sheltered mainly in the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Erbil. Today, the families are returning: of the approximately 19.752 families in the Nineveh prior to 2014, over 8800 have returned to date.