3 of 3

Fed up with violence and unlikely to win back seized land, "they come to the north, bringing what they have," Karadaghi says. "Pretty soon their money is gone. They can't get jobs." For those who speak Arabic instead of the north's dominant Kurdish, the language barrier keeps their kids out of school, thus perpetuating a cycle of disenfranchisement and poverty.

Baghdad has a multibillion-dollar budget surplus thanks to high oil prices, but services for refugees, Christian or otherwise, remain scarce. "Why they're not spending that money on Iraqi refugees, I don't know," Karadaghi says.

Hiltermann says U.S. forces are "preoccupied by Baghdad" and so are unlikely to devote much effort to securing Mosul and other parts of Iraq where large numbers of Christians are threatened. Defeating Mosul's extremists is a task that has fallen to the Iraqi army, a once-ragtag force that has rapidly improved in the last couple years. Early this year, the Iraqi army deployed tanks and other armored vehicles for operations around Mosul. Christians got caught in the crossfire.

"Not only are they being attacked by terrorist groups, but there are also lots of raids going on in their communities," Karadaghi said of Mosul's Christians. "When the Iraqi government is looking for terrorist groups, they come to those neighborhoods. Their houses get searched. And once they get searched, terrorists see them as collaborators. So they are hit twice, sometimes on the same day. It's not easy."

Instead of relying on Baghdad to protect them, some Christian neighborhoods are taking security into their own hands. This fall brought reports of Christians banding together to form unofficial militias. Armed men are setting up checkpoints around their communities to screen for weapons and suspicious strangers.

Meanwhile, Christian neighborhoods in Kurdish-dominated areas have appealed to the autonomous Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) for extra protection, Karadaghi says. The KRG responded by sending men from its fearsome peshmerga force. So-called "pesh" fighters, armed with rockets and machine guns, were responsible for ejecting Hussein's army from northern Iraq in the 1980s and '90s. They continue to patrol northern Iraq under the KRG's auspices — and have even clashed with the Iraqi army in towns that both Baghdad and the KRG claim as their own.

Mosul is one of the last major battlefields in Iraq as the U.S. and Baghdad exert their control over the country. Christians — targeted for their faith and ethnicity, vulnerable because of historical oppression — are at the heart of the fighting. For them, Christmas 2008 will be marked by uncertainty, economic hardship, and even mortal danger. With pesh fighters and neighborhood militias taking measures to secure Christian communities, there is some hope that next year will be better.

But there is no guarantee, and there may be many more Christmases like the one I experienced in Erbil three years ago: quiet, fearful, and fortified.

David Axe is a freelance writer based in Columbia, South Carolina. He blogs at warisboring.com.

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Christianity Today has a special section on Iraq on our website and liveblog.

first page |  3 of 3

share this page

December (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 53