Battle ready

BAQOFA, Iraq—The wind blows and the rain drizzles and pools at my feet, standing atop St. George’s Church. Only moments ago a sudden hailstorm forced everyone under tents or overhangs; but now in the distance the clouds lift, and the sun tries to shine over Nineveh’s greening pasturelands. Spring is coming, and with it field mustard will flower, turning these vistas a bright yellow.

The warmer weather brings a dark foreshadowing: Everyone in this part of Iraq expects a return to combat, as Kurdish forces from the north and Iraqi Army soldiers from the south seem all but certain to launch an attack aimed at taking back Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. Left unanswered, what role will the United States and other coalition forces play in so large an offensive? And for a city that once numbered close to 1 million residents, now snared in months and months of ISIS occupation, what hope of liberation does it have?

ISIS overran Mosul and the surrounding Nineveh Province last summer, an area held for the most part ever since by the militant group, now calling itself Islamic State, with plans to establish a ruling caliphate. Even now that tinpot caliphate is governing about one-third of Iraq, including much of this heartland for Christian believers outside Mosul, where churches and monasteries have thrived almost since the beginning of the 2,000-year history of Christianity itself.

St. George’s sits in the middle of Baqofa, a town of about 500 residents that, along with about 22 other nearby villages, was overrun by ISIS last summer. Nationwide, the ISIS onslaught has displaced about 2.5 million Iraqis, according to March estimates by the UN, all chased from their homes in Nineveh and other provinces since January 2014. The Iraqi government estimates more than 15,000 Iraqis died last year as a result, but no one knows the actual number captured, only that many among those displaced seem to have a family member missing.

Baqofa lies in the middle of the Nineveh plains, about 20 miles north of Mosul and less than two miles from the front line held by ISIS. Nineveh has been settled since the time of the Assyrian Empire (from 2500 B.C. to 605 B.C.), its inhabitants among the first Christian converts. The earliest recorded reference to Baqofa dates to the seventh century, and the earliest Syriac, or Aramaic, inscriptions inside St. George’s have been dated to 1565.

Since 1436, when Mongol invaders first attacked Baqofa, its townspeople have survived countless invasions. A Persian attack in 1743 killed hundreds of residents, and a Kurdish attack in 1833 led also to the deaths of hundreds and the kidnappings of women and children. But not until 2014 did invaders succeed in completely emptying Baqofa.

ISIS militants moved into the area last August, ransacking houses and church property. They cut electricity to the town and cell phone service—as they have done in every community they’ve taken. They forced residents from their homes and at gunpoint chased them in pickup trucks—threatening to kill anyone who didn’t on the spot convert to Islam, or leave.

At St. George’s, the invaders pulled communion wine and serving pieces from a cabinet, tore vestments from a closet, and overturned altarpieces and furnishings in its chapel. The militants destroyed microphones and other equipment used in the Syriac Chaldean church. They left alone a cache of Syriac script found in an upstairs alcove I passed climbing the stone steps to the roof. Similar manuscripts have been turned over to church nuns who fled a convent in Baqofa for safety further north, but this handful was overlooked. One, read by flashlight, appears to be Old Testament Scripture: “Let your eyes be open on this house day and night. …”

ISIS succeeded at holding Baqofa and other nearby towns for about 11 days. Then Kurdish forces, known here as peshmerga, drove them back. They received just-in-time support from U.S. airstrikes, allowing the Kurds to hold nearby Mosul Dam, the country’s largest dam supplying most of Iraq’s water and power. But the air support also allowed Kurds to secure this part of the Nineveh plains, plus hold Kirkuk, the oil-rich city southeast of Mosul. Others, including Qaraqosh, the largest Christian city in the Nineveh plains, remain in ISIS hands.

The Kurds’ feat has been little noted. The peshmerga, at a time when they had no outside help or air cover, swept down from their own territory in the north and fought ISIS house to house, village by village. While Islamic State has made gains in Syria and stole headlines with beheadings in Libya and elsewhere, for nearly nine months now the Kurds and local militias have held off ISIS advances along a 640-mile front in northern Iraq.

“Kurdistan right here is fighting on behalf of the whole world,” said George Khamis, a member of the patrol in Baqofa.

IN RECENT MONTHS the Kurds have turned over patrol of Baqofa and other Christian towns to Dwekh Nawsha, a militia made up largely of Assyrian Christians. Dwekh Nawsha means “self-sacrificers” in Syriac, and its formation has brought new attention to Iraqi Assyrians, long a minority that has survived by coexisting with its more numerous Muslim neighbors.

“After the ISIS advance in Mosul and Nineveh, we concluded that just calling for help at the political level doesn’t bring anything,” said Odisho Yousif, a Dwekh Nawsha founder and commander. “We started to see it is our task, our obligation, to participate in freeing our land. It’s not acceptable to watch our lands taken by terrorist groups—and we just watch while the Kurds fight.”

Yousif said the formation of an armed Christian protection force was a “difficult” decision, and it has not been without controversy. But his force has grown to about 250 mostly volunteer fighters divided into patrols.

They receive meals from the peshmerga and some financing from abroad.

For now that includes Westerners who support the cause and Iraqi Assyrians living overseas: “Our vision is to be the protection units of our villages, our townships, our lands,” said Yousif. Other groups including Christian fighters go under the umbrella Nineveh Protection Units, or NPU, and are training hundreds of fighters in camps, but they do not hold the frontline positions of Dwekh Nawsha.

The U.S. National Defense Authorization Act, approved in December, contained language to train and equip fighters against the Islamic State that can include Sunni tribal fighters, peshmerga, and local forces protecting “vulnerable” minority groups in Nineveh. Yousif hasn’t seen any funds from Washington yet, but Dwekh Nawsha is slowly gaining some advanced weaponry, including night vision capability provided by Australia. With it they’ve aided U.S. fighter jets in marking targets for airstrikes, and recently pinpointed an Islamic State fighter on the rooftop of a church in Batnaya, a town ISIS controls just two miles south of Baqofa, and a Kurdish sniper killed him.

From the St. George’s rooftop looking through binoculars or gun scopes, it’s possible to see a row of black ISIS flags flying from poles in the breeze and to overhear intercepted radio transmissions of the jihadi militants. They don’t always speak in Arabic—often in Hindi, Urdu, or even English—but they call to one another using sometimes familiar code names like “bin Laden” and “Taliban.”

Visible along the ISIS front line are mounds of churned earth where front loaders and diggers are carving trenches. ISIS is digging the fortifications in anticipation of the expected offensive to retake Mosul, 5 feet deep by 5 feet wide with concrete barriers placed in the middle. ISIS has positioned 81mm medium-weight mortars there, too, capable of shelling within a 3- to 4-mile radius. For that reason, Kurdish authorities refuse to allow residents to move back into Baqofa and other nearby towns, but have let some residents return on one-hour passes to retrieve belongings.

Further south, Iraq’s army has engaged ISIS for weeks in a battle to retake Tikrit. The United States insisted Shiite militias—mostly backed by Iran—not be part of that fight in order for the U.S.-led coalition to begin airstrikes in support of Iraqi forces, which started March 25. Already Iraqi forces are dropping leaflets over Mosul, prepping residents for military action; but retired Gen. John Allen, the special presidential envoy for the coalition, has warned against setting a timetable for a Mosul offensive.

Apart from random shellings and sonic booms of U.S. and coalition aircraft overhead, the plains of Nineveh are quiet, desolate even. Standing in the middle of Telskuf, about two miles northwest of Baqofa and once a city of about 7,000, the desolation is more oppressive.

I visited Telskuf in 2007 just after al-Qaeda in Iraq set off a car bomb that killed 10 and wounded about 150 residents. Now Telskuf is eerie, empty. The corner bakery selling large platters of baklava: closed. A convent where Dominican nuns distributed food and clothing: padlocked. The streets of the old city where children chased one another to school and vendors sold pistachios and fresh meat: silent and stilled but for an abandoned donkey and a stray goat.

“You have probably seen worse than this, but there is nothing worse than a city without people. It is like a graveyard,” said Khamis, who accompanied me in Nineveh Province.

Khamis, married with two children, fled Iraq and the Saddam Hussein regime 23 years ago to Melbourne, Australia. His childhood home near Baqofa was destroyed in 2004 during the Iraq war, and he returned briefly during that time. But watching ISIS move into the area last summer prompted this return to join the fight.

“These people have been occupied for thousands of years, but to have been torn out by the roots and lose everything? And for months, now, nothing? Someone has to act,” he said.

THE HUMAN FLIGHT from Mosul and Nineveh plains provoked a humanitarian disaster that, at least outwardly, appears as stalemated as the military situation. But the number of displaced people (technically Internally Displaced Persons, or IDPs) actually has grown since the first of the year.

Fighting against ISIS further south in Anbar province and Tikrit prompted more Iraqis to leave their homes. But with so many Iraqis wanting to leave the country entirely—and tens of thousands having fled to Turkey and other countries—the rising number of homeless is startling.

In Dohuk Governorate alone more than 750 buildings either abandoned or under construction are housing IDPs registered with the UN (there likely are more). The city, roughly the size of Dallas and already beset with refugees from Syria’s civil war, had registered by the end of February 441,000 IDPs. Yousif Matty, a pastor who heads four schools in the north, including a new one serving mostly Yezidi IDPs outside Dohuk, told me: “No person, no country, no humanitarian organization can supply this level of need. We have hundreds of thousands of people who have lost everything spread across the country.”

Nine months after ISIS invaded Mosul, it’s hard to measure the improvements for families who fled north last year. Lacking a political or military solution, they cannot return to their homes. Many say they don’t plan to anyway: Fear and distrust are too great, plus the present threat of ISIS kidnappings, beheadings, and other killings.

Some do find apartments to rent, while others remain in tent camps or improvised lodging, living on donated items. “Improvised” lodging means living in cement block rooms in unfinished buildings, making homes out of office spaces in a downtown shopping center, or squeezing multiple families into two-room trailers (similar to those provided along the Gulf coast after Hurricane Katrina) parked in vacant lots.

Last summer St. Peter and Paul Assyrian Church of the East in Dohuk took in about 60 families forced to leave Mosul and surrounding towns. Some slept in the sanctuary. In March nine families remained—all living in one large room of the church, similar to a wide-open fellowship hall in an American church.

Using sofas as dividers, the room has been segregated, but there’s no privacy. Rugs delineate each family’s space, and they are lined with thin mattresses, folding tables, and plastic chairs. Cardboard boxes of food, diapers, and other supplies double as places to spread blankets, towels, or laundry to dry. There is one bathroom serving all nine families—and it is outside and across a courtyard.

“We came here eight months ago,” one mother who did not want to give her name told me. “First from Mosul we fled to Telskuf, then we had to flee Telskuf. I was born in Mosul, but they told us Christians we had to get out.” Dohuk’s winters are colder than in Mosul, she said, and her children have been sick. Plus, several men chimed in, there are no jobs.

Some of the families are from Telskuf, and the Kurdish peshmerga allowed the fathers to return on one-hour passes. It was long enough to learn they had nothing to go back to. They showed me photos on their mobile phones of the destruction: some of their houses in rubble, others with busted doors and overturned furniture, drawers emptied and valuables stolen, cars crushed beneath debris. “They stole everything,” said Faez Ablahad, who was a policeman in Telskuf. “They did not leave us anything. And if I go back, I will be killed.”

NEXT DOOR TO Galaxy Hall and Restaurant in the Ankawa district of Erbil, Kurdistan’s capital, 170 families are living in an incomplete hotel high-rise. The owners halted construction on the eight-story facility—and instead put up raw concrete block walls to divide the open space, added railings and windows, creating two-room units. They rent for $120 a month—and some are shared by multiple families. Restrooms are down the hall, and cooking happens mostly in the wide corridors, with laundry hanging nearby. One young boy plays by himself, dipping a comb in a bucket of water and running it up the cracks in the wall, watching as the water drips down.

The families here, totaling 750 persons, receive help from European NGOs, local churches, plus church leaders themselves displaced from Nineveh. In the week I visited the building, now called Al-Amal Hope Center, its rolls included 72 babies, two pregnant women, 14 handicapped persons, and 20 widows. Importantly, the families here are both Yezidis and Christians, two religious groups that have rarely lived so closely together.

Nidal, a young mother from Qaraqosh whose husband was captured by ISIS and remains missing, said both Christian and Yezidi families are helping her. As we talked a young Yezidi girl helped her son get dressed.

Despite the challenging conditions, Al-Amal is clean and safe, said Samah Anwar, a 23-year-old student who studied medicine at the University of Mosul. She was preparing for her final exams when ISIS took over. She and her family are Yezidis and escaped their village in a small sedan filled with 15 people. Their homes have been destroyed: “I have no hope of going back, maybe someday, but it will take a long time.”

She pointed out that Al-Amal means “hope,” the name given the building by Michael Najeeb, a Chaldean priest from Mosul who helped convert the hotel to IDP housing. “He taught us to be hopeful and patient so we may return to our home some day,” she said.

Najeeb, now living in Erbil, is working with Protestant pastors to meet the needs of IDPs and organize fellowship and new ministries. Two days before I visited Al-Amal, he helped to lead a Saturday women’s conference attended by about 300 women—all Christian and Yezidi IDPs.

ISIS, he told them, “is destroying our culture, our heritage, and our humanity. … We have to be patient and we have to pray. Our fight is to pray.”

Out in Nineveh those on patrol are praying and readying to fight. Asked if he wants his militia members to participate in a battle to recapture Mosul, Odisho Yousif replied: “Yes, we expect to be asked and we are willing. We are out of patience. It’s a long time waiting for that day to come.”