Yes, the ISIS conflict is a religious war

Editor’s note: WORLD magazine editor Mindy Belz spoke at the Religious Freedom Summit at Cedarville University last week, sharing observations she’s gathered from her reporting travels that have taken her in and out of these war-torn parts of the globe, including Iraq. She reports something Republicans and Democrats alike in Washington refuse to acknowledge: ISIS means to fight a religious war, and what we are hearing in the Middle East and Africa is what it sounds like when religious freedom is completely wiped out. Here is an edited version of her speech:

I’ll begin with this comment: “The center of the Islamic State is in Mosul. Christian families are threatened by terrorists. They come and they chase them, and it’s getting dangerous enough that many of them have to leave.”

Mosul is the capital of Nineveh province in northern Iraq. That comment was from 2008, and it was spoken to me by a member of Mosul’s provincial council when I was there at that time.

Here’s another one: “Iraq totters on the edge of extinction as a nation-state.” That was Jim Hoagland writing in The Washington Post in 2007. The headlines that we’ve all seen this year talk about ISIS or ISIL, now calling itself the Islamic State, and exploded on the scene in Iraq this summer. But they are not, in fact, telling us anything new. Anyone seriously watching what’s been happening in Iraq for the last 10 years or more—not just the last six months—knew the Islamic jihadist determination to root out Christians has been deadly brutal and, tragically, ongoing. At the root of it in countries under Islamic control is a deadly, deadly battle to prevent religious freedom.

In 2008, I journeyed into Mosul with Evelyn Aroja. Aroja was, at the time, one of three Assyrian Christians on the provincial council, which is a governing council of the province. It had 41 members. Due to the threats at that time, Aroja had to move two hours outside of Mosul with her family and was having to commute in to the city. As we neared the city, she reached down into her black leather handbag. In the bottom of her handbag was a handgun wrapped in a beautiful printed scarf. She handed the handgun to her driver, and she wrapped the scarf around her head. I didn’t have a handgun, but I did put a scarf around my head.

These were the circumstances that Christians were operating under in Mosul six years ago.

During that time, the Islamic fighters in the city, possibly some of the same ones that have been fighting in Iraq, killed 12 council members. Aroja called them martyrs to democracy, and they were Arab Muslims, Assyrian Christians, and Kurds. The oldest was 80, and the youngest was 34. She was a veterinarian and a mom. These were just folks, you might say. A lot of times, we think there’s a different calculus going on in the Middle East, but people are people everywhere. Mosul had probably close to a million and a half residents in 2008, except that nearly one-third of the city at that time had already fled these kinds of dangers. So when ISIS moved into Mosul this past June, they moved into an already decimated city.

Ten years ago, the Christian population was estimated to be about 30,000. In June, when Christians were given a 24-hour notice, an ultimatum to convert to Islam or be killed, and they began to flee again, there were maybe between 5,000 and 10,000 left. We don’t know for sure because they have now fled and scattered once again.

ISIS stormed into homes (and this too was happening in 2008 when I was there) during the night, ordering people to leave with only their clothes. An elderly man who fled with only about 100 people to an Assyrian church out in Nineveh plain said they came into the house and said, if you convert to Islam you can stay in your home, otherwise, get out. And then, in kind of a trembling voice, he said, “I had a chicken I wanted to take for food but even that they did not let me take.”

Today, in October 2014, winter is approaching in Iraq. I’ve been in the northern parts of Iraq when there’s been pretty substantial snowfall. At present, there are somewhere between 600,000 and 1 million Iraq residents who have been forced from their homes just since June. That group includes nearly all of the Christians living in Mosul and the surrounding villages of Nineveh.

It also includes most of the country’s Yazidi population, many Kurds, and many Muslims who also have much to fear from the Islamic State. Add to that the toll of the Islamic State’s role in Syria, which preceded what we’ve seen happen this summer. The UN’s official figure is 3.1 million refugees are now living in other places in the Middle East or beyond. About 191,000 Syrians have been killed in three years of civil war there.

Numbers aside, what has caught the attention of many Americans, including our president, and moved us to action have been the videos of beheadings. But we don’t know the extent of beheadings by the Islamic State. We know that ISIS in the city of Raqqa in Northern Syria beheaded 50 men in a day’s time. We have heard reports, and I’ve been sent pictures (but I can’t verify them), of children who have been beheaded and dismembered. I do know that in 2008 I talked to a number of people who could testify to Islamic militants literally cutting up children and leaving them in the street or leaving them at the doorstep of a Christian family. It’s a very potent message.

Right now, the ISIS front is in the area of the city of Kobani, which is at Syria’s border with Turkey, and 186,000 people in a week’s time have fled from Syria into Turkey. Now Turkey has tried to close that border, and those people who did not get out are trapped. There’s a very real possibility, despite U.S. airstrikes that have started in that area, that the Islamic State will take control of this area, which would signify an Islamic terrorist organization with territorial control at the southern flank of NATO.

We face a very serious war. What we face in the Middle East, is a religious war, and a war that is likely to grow worse, much worse, potentially overnight, before it lessens in any way. I mean to alarm you. The very survival of our brothers and sisters, Christians in Iraq and Syria, not to mention hundreds of thousands of others in this region, is a vivid picture of religious freedom lost. It is the tragic result of what happens when religious liberty, individual rights of speech, belief, and conscience are not upheld.

If we in the West aren’t sure that it’s about religion, and if our diplomats in the State Department want to downplay that aspect of it, then be assured that the other side knows what’s up. Here’s an excerpt from a statement by ISIS that was published just about two weeks ago:

“We will conquer your Rome. We will break your crosses and enslave your women by the permission of Allah, the exalted. This is his promise to us: He is glorified and he does not fail in his promise. If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave markets.”

The statement goes on and on, and it’s very explicit in its threats against America, against President Barack Obama, and against America’s Christians. Of course, this isn’t only happening in Iraq, but it’s a place to focus because of the headlines. It’s not only happening in the Middle East. The lack of religious freedom, according to Pew Research Organization, is affecting more than 70 percent of the world’s population. While it flares right now in countries under Muslim domination, it also flares in other places with a collectivist spirit, in communist countries like China and North Korea.

Nigeria also is facing a serious war against jihadists that go by the name of Boko Haram. A Nigerian lawyer named Emmanuel Ogebe testified this month before Congress. He told of how a pastor told him nine boys in his congregation were on their way back from a youth group meeting when they were stopped by Boko Haram. All of them were executed roadside. He had to bury all of them. They were all members of his congregation.

We heard so much about the schoolgirls who were kidnapped, but we heard less about this, which happened just before that. One hundred fifty Christians were killed in a single day by Boko Haram militants using chainsaws. We are talking about brutal, extremist kinds of violence that escape both our imagination and our language. Boko Haram has claimed the lives of over 10,000 people since 2009, and its militants have killed individuals from 15 countries. That makes it potentially the most violent of these organizations, far more than ISIS, than al-Qaeda, and possibly than the Taliban in Afghanistan.

You might say that these countries don’t recognize or guarantee religious freedom, so it shouldn’t surprise us that these kinds of things would happen. But, in fact, Nigeria and Iraq both have constitutions that in some way guarantee religious freedom. Nearly every Muslim country is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. When that declaration was authored in 1948, Muslim countries, particularly Egypt and a couple of the gulf states, were actually at the forefront of it. While there has been controversy over that, they remain signatories to it. So it’s right to assume, I think, that a good God has embedded religious freedom in the hearts of men and women everywhere. And, at the same time, we can recognize in a fallen world evil forces are at work who want to destroy it.

Religious freedom means not only preserving basic human dignity, preserving our freedom of thought and conscience and belief, but it also presumes that questions about God and about eternity and about our purpose in life matter, and people should be free to explore them both privately and publically. People should be free to explore those things without fear of government interference and without the jihadists.

I was in Baghdad this spring. On a warm Sunday evening, after I had attended a Christian worship service, some people said I should go check out what’s going on in this room upstairs. I knew there were some Shiite Muslim women meeting there. They had been coming to the church, and the church had been giving them food parcels. I climbed the stairs, and I heard their voices, and there was some music. I expected to see a dozen or so women inside, but, to my amazement, I walked into a large room full of Shiite women. I stopped counting at 350. I believe there were close to 400 women in the room. They were jammed together in seats. They were dressed in the full burqas, head-to-toe, that Shiite women in Baghdad wear.

These women had been coming every week to hear women in the church talk about their lives as Christians, to talk about what it means to be a Christian, to talk about how Christian and Muslim women can share life together, can learn how to love one another. They hear Scripture. Their teachers and the women who speak are careful not to do things that will alarm anyone who might overhear them. And it’s interesting because the room that they’re meeting in has a government building right across the street from it. The windows are open and the guards are walking. There are about three checkpoints right in there, and this is happening every week.

The war that has been brought by groups like ISIS and Boko Haram and others has impoverished those hundreds of heavily veiled Muslim women, coming inside the gates of a church in downtown Baghdad, not for a few minutes, but more like two hours. It has made their streets dangerous, it has made their lives uncertain, and it has made them spiritually hungry. It’s not enough for them to come and receive parcels of food. They need something to feed their souls, somewhere to help them understand the purpose and the meaning that God has in their lives. The quest for religious freedom and religious expression isn’t something that’s only in the heart of a Christian, and it’s not something that was dreamed up by red-blooded Americans with names like Adams and Jefferson. It’s in the heart of you and me, but it’s also in the hearts of men and women and boys and girls everywhere.

Listen to an excerpt from Mindy Belz’s address on religious freedom on The World and Everything in It: