“ISIS isn’t the main reason why Christians are leaving Iraq now,” says Elizabeth Sana. “It’s lack of work.” She is the supervisor of a women’s project in Aradin, a picturesque Christian village in Kurdistan, northern Iraq. Mosul, only 93 miles away, seems another world in this pure mountain air.
Since 2003, when Christians became a target for al-Qaeda, this village with hills that each spring are clad in emerald green, has provided a haven for Iraqis, whether Chaldean Catholics or Orthodox. “It is paradise,” says our taxi driver, as a rosary jangles over his windscreen mirror. There’s one problem, he adds glumly: “No jobs.”
Local men, sustained by handouts from Iraqi relations abroad, scrape by with odd jobs. Since July, however, a portion of Aradin’s 170-odd women have been earning $150 a month – equivalent to four weeks’ rent – for stitching aprons and hemming handbags.
Chatting in Neo-Aramaic, they ply their needles in a one-storey house on a hillside, sitting on red plastic chairs below an image of the Holy Family. “I asked the women what they wanted to do,” says Dr Amal Marogy, the founder of the Aradin Charitable Trust, sponsor of the workshops. She has been selling their wares in England. “Now they want to open a shop.”
Marogy is a blue-eyed linguist who left Iraq aged 18. Her father was from Aradin. Now she is a researcher in Neo-Aramaic at Cambridge. “Aradin is Aramaic for the Garden of Eden,” she says. It is easy to see why. Walnut trees dot the churchyard, a riot of cherries, apricots, and figs grow here each summer. This fertile beauty caught the eye of Saddam Hussein, who, shortly before invading Kuwait in 1990, began to build a palace here. When he was deposed in 2003, violence erupted against Christians. Priests were killed and girls snatched off Baghdad’s streets. “We left after my brother-in-law was kidnapped and a ransom of $70,000 requested,” says Sana.
“Arriving in Aradin, I forgot all about Baghdad,” adds Najit Israel, as she deftly irons a stack of bags adorned with the silhouette of Our Lady of Sheshan. “I feel protected here by St Sultana Mahdokht.”
This 4th-century martyr was engaged to the Emperor of Persia, when she arrived in Aradin while hunting with her brothers. One was injured. The monk summoned to heal him said he could do so only through the power of Christ. After baptism, the siblings hid in Aradin, were found and then killed for refusing to revert to Zoroastrianism.
Anti-Christian violence here is nothing new. “In 1915, a thousand Christian girls were rounded up at gunpoint, and told to become Muslim or die,” says Marogy’s uncle. “All chose death.”
Today, the autonomous region of Kurdistan is secure for believers, thanks to its pro-Christian president, Masoud Barzani. Leaving Erbil, the Kurdish capital, by taxi, we were waved through checkpoints after the casual question: “Sourayeh?” (Christians?)
“People are very welcoming,” says Amel George, who fled to Aradin after ISIS seized Qaraqosh, her home city on the Nineveh plains. She left in a hurry, after the funeral of children just killed by a bomb. “We had no time to fetch the money in our safe,” says George. Her husband recently returned to Qaraqosh, now liberated. “Our house is standing, but empty. And it’s filthy,” she says. In Aradin, when they ran out of rent money, “the priest found us a house for free,” she says, separating a thick red thread into two fine strands.
Like all the women, she works as though hungry for labour. The crash in oil prices has hit Kurdistan badly. Men such as Doraid, a Christian electrician slumped on his mother Layla’s curved sofa, cannot find work. Those in permanent employment also struggle. “The Kurdish government hasn’t paid wages for four months now,” he says.
Perhaps he too will leave, like his friends, to seek work in Turkey. In Aradin, however, two jobless local youths will start work next week in the bakery opened by Marogy’s Trust. “One of the sewing ladies was shaking from hunger when the bread ran out last winter,” she says. Now her focus is finding $25,000 (£20,000) to buy the community a bus so that Christian children can travel safely to school. “We need money for a water tanker too,” says Marogy, aware that although Aradin’s water is plentiful, neighbouring villages have water for just an hour each day.
Such challenges must be met, she argues, if Iraq’s dwindling Christian presence is to remain. A long-promised community centre, Jesuit-run and offering vocational courses, may open in 2017. Meanwhile, like every true daughter of Aradin, Marogy has faith in St Sultana’s intercession. “Every villager owns a stone from her church, and keeps it with them, wherever they are in the world.”
She keeps two, just in case, in her purse.
Bess Twiston Davies is a freelance journalist specialising in religious affairs. For more information, visit aradin.org.uk
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