Servant of refugees

After Palm Sunday services finished at Good Shepherd Chaldean Cathedral in Toronto in mid-March, Insaf Safou boarded a plane, lugging multiple bags weighed down with items to give Iraqi refugees in Turkey. Over the next several weeks—and with terrorist alerts at their highest level across Europe and the Mediterranean—she planned to help lead conferences she organized for hundreds of Iraqi and Syrian refugee women, themselves victims of terrorism.

For the wife, mother, and grandmother who turns 58 this year, the trip abroad is a kind of coming home, too. Insaf herself once was a refugee. In 1994 she and her husband Shawki, along with their two young children, left Iraq, finding life under Saddam Hussein intolerable.

Shawki had served through two wars in Iraq’s military, while Insaf taught high-school physics. When Baath Party higher-ups complained that she wasn’t showing proper favoritism in grading their children, she began to fear their threats. Eventually the couple left their home in Kirkuk, where Insaf, after growing up Catholic, had joined an evangelical church. They moved to Baghdad, but threats and hardships there prompted them to leave Iraq for good. They spent seven years in Turkey, mostly Istanbul, before they were granted asylum in Canada and moved to Toronto in 2001.

Now a Canadian citizen, Insaf is back in the Middle East to serve refugees, to commiserate with their hardships and try to alleviate their needs, recalling her own dislocation and the long years of waiting, day after day, with little idea what the future held. Insaf held her first women’s conference in 2005 at a Baghdad church. Since ISIS took over territory in Iraq in 2014, displacing tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians who refused to convert to Islam, Insaf has turned her focus to conferences aimed at helping women traumatized by ISIS, also called the Islamic State or Daesh.

“They have lost homes, jobs, friends,” said Insaf. “We will speak of Jesus being our security and peace.”

Most of the women who attend are displaced Christians, but Insaf welcomes Yazidis and Muslims. Sessions include counseling, along with Bible teaching, singing, and a meal. Insaf also planned to present a gift to each woman and her family heading into Easter celebrations, which for many in the Middle East do not take place until May 1. Gift bags can include a scarf or sweater, cosmetics, books, and other items donated through her network of church supporters in Canada and the United States.

‘We are persecuted based on our belief. We should test our belief now.’

“I focus on women because I see them as key in the family. And I want to help them be healed of all the trauma they have been through,” Insaf told me before her departure on what is possibly her 17th or 18th trip to the war-torn country since 2003.

Millions of Iraqis and Syrians remain displaced by ongoing war and Islamic State takeovers of their cities and towns. Many who attend the women’s conferences have survived face-to-face threats from militants, and many are wives and mothers of ISIS victims, relatives they know to be in captivity, or killed.

Of her own time in exile, Insaf said she cleaned and sewed while living in borrowed lodging, working to support her family in Istanbul. “I worked to keep my dignity and feed my children,” something she says helps her understand Iraq’s current war victims. “They need to build their dignity as much as feed their families. Small projects will help them do that. And small projects will grow.”

I first met Insaf in 2003 when I accompanied her on her first return trip to Iraq. I was a reporter covering war, and Insaf’s journey home represented for me a way to report on what was happening to everyday Iraqis. Her reunion with family, I thought, would be a touching, symbolic re-entry. She would guide me through the ancient streets of Baghdad, deciphering the war and the place for Americans back home. I saw Insaf as a little-understood emblem of war at the dawn of the 21st century: the global refugee.

But Insaf hadn’t returned to Iraq in 2003 to explain “the meaning of Iraq,” to explore dusty souks, or to analyze her own experience. She was there to help Christians—some of them relatives and others strangers she considered brothers and sisters in her faith. I would meet many like her—people who thought nothing of spending all their time and savings to help a fellow Iraqi, whether friend, relative, or stranger.

At the start of the Iraq War Insaf and others saw a window of opportunity to regain what they had lost under Saddam in what everyone was calling “the new Iraq.” Insaf hoped she and her family could one day return to live there, to start a business perhaps, and to put down roots again.

Terrorism and prolonged war put an end to that dream. But by that time Insaf knew of so many ways to help she couldn’t stop going back. She taught sewing and other skills, helped churches set up charity programs, and set up ministries to visit women in prisons and in the poor neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities where war took an especially harsh toll.

As the war years ground on, I made sure to find Insaf on return trips to Iraq. We traveled together in falling snow and searing heat, meeting people and learning their stories in lush homes, crowded apartments, donated tents, and even a downtown shopping mall where victims of ISIS took refuge. Insaf helped me stay grounded amid the ambiguity of life in a war zone. She came to be an emblem not of war but of surviving war—of how ordinary people outside the headlines got on with starting sewing businesses, opening bakeshops, and going to school every day, knowing that car bombs, street battles, and kidnappings were part of the day-to-day reality.

At the height of fighting, the courage of the American soldiers and Marines facing IED explosions or fighting door-to-door was readily apparent on nightly newscasts. Few saw the heroism it took for a mother to take a child’s hand and walk her to school each morning, for a shopkeeper to insert a key in a lock and open his jewelry store, or for a businessperson to step up to a bank counter and make a deposit at the end of the day.

As one season of war gave way to another, Insaf increasingly was convinced any solution for Iraq would be “not by troops and killing people but by healing.” She prayed for healing, she said, not only for those chased by ISIS but for ISIS militants, too. “We are persecuted based on our belief,” she said. “We should test our belief now.”

For Insaf, testing her beliefs meant remaining in Iraq all through the summer of 2014, as Islamic State militants chased Christians and others from their homes in Mosul and across Nineveh Plain. Insaf teamed up with local clergy and visiting relief teams to ferry supplies—water, baby formula, bread, and mattresses—to families sleeping on church pews and back lots, and sometimes on the side of the road.

Returning one day to a church in Erbil, Insaf saw one mother arrive with a baby barely 4 hours old. Jacob Naseer Abba was born as ISIS attacked. His mother had a cesarean section delivery, then both infant and mother joined throngs of families leaving the city on foot. Nearing Erbil, a stranger flagged an ambulance to take them to the church. When they arrived, the weary mother placed her newborn into Insaf’s arms.

In Toronto between trips to Iraq, Insaf decided to pray and fast over all the hardships she witnessed. She fasted for three days, and each day found her mind returning to a passage from the Old Testament: the first chapter of Micah. Over the phone as we talked, Insaf began reciting the verses from memory:

The LORD is coming out of His place, and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth. And the mountains will melt under Him, and the valleys will split open, like wax before the fire, like waters poured down a steep place.

“These high places of the earth are ISIS,” she said, “and they will melt under God’s feet. I believe that.”

For refugees gathering in Turkey and Iraq to hear Insaf this spring, themselves now nearly two years into a forced exile, Insaf said she will remind them, as she did at similar conferences a year ago: “Daesh destroyed our culture, our churches, and our lives. But women have life-giving power within them, and Daesh cannot destroy the God who made us; they cannot kill our God-given dignity.”

—Mindy Belz is the author of They Say We Are Infidels: On the Run from ISIS with Persecuted Christians in the Middle East (Tyndale, 2016), available online and in bookstores April 19. Some of this material appears in the book.