Iraqi Christians evacuated to Eastern Europe

A privately chartered Airbus 321 on Thursday carried 149 Christian refugees from the camp in northern Iraq that has been their refuge for more than a year to their new home in Slovakia. On board were families from Qaraqosh, the largest Christian city in Nineveh Plains, which was overtaken in August 2014 by ISIS fighters who forced out Kurdish forces and killed or displacing nearly all the city’s 50,000 residents.

This first of several planned evacuations of Iraqi Christians is the work of the Nazarene Fund. Under the auspices of leading advocate Johnnie Moore, the group has raised more than $12 million for the “legal evacuation and resettlement of displaced Christians” from Iraq and Syria.

The evacuees are all Catholic Christian families who have been living in temporary trailer housing in Mar Elia Camp outside Erbil. Most were planning to leave Iraq, somehow.

“From the very beginning we were responding to the requests of the church and to the community,” Moore told me by phone from Rome after accompanying the refugees to Slovakia. In the last six months, he said, aid workers have noticed “a significant shift” among the internally displaced persons (IDPs), survivors of an ISIS onslaught who have been living in Iraqi Kurdistan since mid-2014. “They were going to leave. We were concerned about them leaving illegally. If we could help them to leave another way than dying in boats, we wanted to do that.”

The evacuation almost didn’t happen, as Kurdish authorities closed airspace in northern Iraq this week after Russian air strikes appeared to threaten commercial planes. The European charter reserved for the evacuation canceled the flight, and a local plane was substituted with the help of Iran-based Zagros Airlines. As soon as Kurdish authorities reopened airspace, the flight departed, with a medic on board to assist the refugees, most of whom had never flown before.

Why Slovakia?

“Slovakia said yes,” Moore told me. Unlike Western nations, including the United States, several countries in Eastern Europe, including Poland and Czech Republic, have agreed to take Christian refugees.

The planeload of Iraqis flew Dec. 10 to Kosice. The largest city in eastern Slovakia, Kosice also was a center of Christian resistance as Nazi occupation gave way to communist persecution of the church.

Before the Iraqis’ departure, they went through “an extensive vetting process” that followed and exceeded U.S. and UN standards for examining refugees, Moore said. Kurdish authorities have been cooperative in that process, but Moore noted, “all along the way there were bad guys wanting to stop the process,” including threats to the families from extremists.

Moore said the Nazarene Fund budgeted $25,000 per family to resettle them in Slovakia under a three-year plan arranged with the Slovak government and local church leaders. That includes housing for the refugees just outside the city of Mitra and providing a community center, along with nine months’ language training and job assistance.

“We want to make sure they can integrate and be sure they learn the language and have places to stay,” Moore said. “The goal is not to tether them to charity but the help them get on their own feet.”

The Nazarene Fund has plans to work with two additional sets of Iraqi Christian refugees and evacuate them to countries in eastern Europe.

Moore has been a leading advocate for Iraq’s displaced Christians and authored the 2015 book, DEFYING ISIS: Preserving Christianity in the Place of Its Birth. The Nazarene Fund received an unexpected fundraising boost when Moore appeared on The Glenn Beck Program to describe atrocities facing Iraq’s Christians, and Beck made a spontaneous appeal for viewers to contribute. Moore, a Baptist, last month joined the Ben Carson presidential campaign as its faith advisor. He said the work with refugees is separate from his role with Carson but represented a level of cooperation among ancient churches and evangelicals, Protestants and Catholics he hoped to encourage: “I am a Baptist but I am so proud to be serving with orthodox church communities in the cradle of Christianity.”