Northern Iraq: Christians in distress

Now that the fighters of "Islamic State" (IS) have been driven away from the northern Iraqi province of Mosul, the Christians living there are facing new problems, as the Göttingen-based human rights organization Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) reported on Thursday. "Representatives of the Assyrians/Aramaeans/ Chaldeans fear a gradual demographic change at the expense of the Christian communities, especially in the Nineveh Plain region to the north and east of the city of Mosul. More and more Muslims are moving there," stated Kamal Sido, the STP's Middle East consultant. "In order to prevent further tensions between the different ethnic groups, the Iraqi central government and the Kurdistan regional government must finally find an agreement concerning the administrative affiliation of the Nineveh Plains and other embattled regions – and the communities must be granted more say with regard to shaping the future."

The Nineveh Plains have always been populated by Christians, being one of the last areas of Iraq where they could live in relative peace until IS attacked them in 2014. The Christians had hoped to establish their own autonomous administration there, so as to keep the members of their religious community from trying to escape to Europe. Since 2015, the number of Christians throughout Iraq has fallen from 275,000 to about 150,000.

The Christians feel oppressed by the Muslims, especially in the town of Bartalla, 15 kilometers east of Mosul, which was previously only inhabited by Christians. Following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, around 10,000 refugees (mainly Christians from Arab Iraq) found shelter in the city, which now has about 30,000 inhabitants. A building project named "Sultan City" was initiated in 2013, comprising 182 new residential units in Bartalla. According to the Christian residents, many of whom have lost most of their belongings during the war, only Muslims can afford to buy one of the quite expensive homes there. "Christians are calling for Christian families to move there, arguing that the new buildings are being built on land that has, after all, always belonged to Christians," Sido emphasized. There are reports about attempts to tamper with land registers in order to reject this criticism. On average, an apartment in "Sultan City" costs around 75 million Iraqi Dinars – equivalent to about 55,000 EUR.

About 80 percent of the Christian population of Bartalla belong to the Syrian Orthodox Church, and the remaining 20 percent are Syrian Catholics. They all speak Aramaic. In recent years, members of the Shabak minority have settled in the city. Many of the Shabak – Shiite Muslims who speak a Kurdish dialect – were forced to flee from Mosul due to attacks by IS. There are approximately 300,000 of them living in Iraq today, most of them in the province of Mosul.

Header image: Kamal Sido/GfbV 2012