They Say We Are Infidels: On the Run from ISIS with Persecuted Christians in the Middle East by Belz Mindy

Author:Belz, Mindy [Belz, Mindy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: POLITICAL SCIENCE / World / Middle Eastern, RELIGION / Christian Life / Social Issues, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781496411495
Publisher: Tyndale Momentum
Published: 2016-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

12

FASTING AND FLIGHT

Aleppo, Syria, 2008

The Iraqi voice is heard as an echo, not as a sound.

SYRIAN PHYSICIAN JANY HADDAD

IN OCTOBER I followed the Iraqi refugees to Syria. Driving across the border as they had done was suicidal, I was told, so I caught a flight from Erbil to Damascus. Along Straight Street in the old city, I had lunch with Syrian church leaders to learn how they were coping with the influx of Iraqis. Ramadan had just ended, bringing in Eid al-Fitr, the festival marking the breaking of the monthlong fast, and restaurants were jammed.

After lunch, a pastor named Rami drove me to a town on the outskirts of Damascus called Jaramana, an Assyrian enclave where so many Iraqi Christians had migrated they had revised the street names. On a corner called Fallujah Place, I changed money amid honking taxis and shouts of shoppers bartering in Arabic. Through an open doorway I could see Iraqi barbers cutting hair, and next to them Iraqi pizza makers shot circles of dough high into the air while bantering with men on the street. Mosul, where many of these Iraqis had come from, was a city on lockdown, even as many of its residents carried on their lives in the freewheeling frenzy of Jaramana. In Syria’s safer atmosphere, the Iraqi Christians were welcomed into old churches or started new ones of their own.

After spending a night in a downtown monastery, I boarded a bus to travel through the Syrian countryside several hours north to Aleppo. Once there, I spent a week climbing stairs and back alleys, helped sometimes by church leaders who arranged meetings with some of the refugees. I talked with many Iraqis in their temporary homes; I stood with others as they waited in line for food parcels and listened to their tragic stories of flight.

One of the refugees I met was Parsegh Setrak, a fifty-four-year-old engineer from Mosul who worked under contract with Bechtel, a large construction and civil-engineering company. Starting in 2005, militants threatened him on the way to work, and they bombed his office twice before it was closed. But what forced him to flee with his family were the threats to kidnap his seventeen-year-old daughter.

“They would follow her on foot, and then in a red car. This happened many times, and many girls were being kidnapped from school and killed because they are Christians,” he said.

One day Parsegh’s daughter emerged from school to see three men waiting in the red car. She ran down the street in the other direction, then made her way home. But rounding the corner, she saw the red car. The men were stalking her.

The next day Parsegh began selling everything the family owned. Then he, his wife, and their three children packed themselves into his car with some clothes and a few family photos, and they escaped to Syria. Because of checkpoints and questioning at the border, it took eighteen hours to make what should have been an eight-hour journey to Aleppo. They

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