Christian refugees from Iraq are trying to find a new home in predominantly Christian states

According to the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP), hardly any of the Christian refugees from Iraq are thinking about returning. As Kamal Sido, the STP’s Middle East Consultant, stated in Göttingen on Friday, many of the Iraqi Christians don’t see a future for themselves in their home country. Islamic State (IS) has been defeated, but there are ongoing denominational and ethnic conflicts among the Shiites, Sunni Muslims. Many Iraqi refugees who found shelter in Jordan would thus prefer to resettle to Europe, America, or Asia, to live in predominantly Christian societies rather than in fragile states that are threatened by civil wars and by radical Islamist groups – such as Iraq, Syria, or Turkey.

Further, Sido stated that many of the Christians don’t feel welcome in Iraq any more – and the authorities aren’t trying to do much to change this, as could be seen in connection with job positions in civil service, for example. “The Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research has missed a chance to encourage the Christians to return: Last week, the Muslim scientist Aqeel Yahya Hashim al-Araji from southern Iraq was appointed President of the University of Al-Hamdaniya, near Mossul,” Sido reported. His Christian competitor Anis Behnam Noam Haddad, who co-founded the university in 2014, was at least equally qualified, and many university colleagues and the Christian churches in the region had spoken out for him. According to Sido, the decision in favor of the Muslim candidate is especially disappointing as none of the current presidents of the public universities in Iraq is of Christian faith. For centuries, the Christians in the Nineveh Plains around Mosul were in the majority, until IS invaded the region in 2014. Today, there are only a few of them left.

The Christian refugees from Iraq also feel discriminated against in the predominantly Muslim kingdom of Jordan. Media reports and posts on social media platforms confirm this. In June 2018, the UNHCR stated that at least 10,000 of the approximately 66,823 Iraqi refugees in Jordan are Christians. Most of them belong to the population groups of the Chaldeans or Assyrians, and they speak different dialects of the Aramaic language, the language of Jesus. They don’t want to give up their mother tongue. However, as they are non-Arabs, their language is not taught at public schools in Jordan – which is another reason for them to want to leave the Arab kingdom. According to the UNHCR, there are 751,275 refugees living in Jordan, and 666,294 of them are from Syria.

Header Picture: Michael Swan via Flickr