The left-leaning investigative journalism outlet ProPublica published an extremely troubling piece that implicitly criticized the Trump administration and the U.S. Agency for International Development for providing direct aid to Christian and Yazidi victims of genocide at the hands of the Islamic State. The article focuses on these vulnerable and already devastated communities, which were almost completely annihilated by ISIS, for purely political purposes, to make it seem as if the administration is favoring Christians over other minorities on the basis of religion.
The article’s author justifies her criticism by distorting and leaving out important facts that not only justify the aid but prove its critical impact for both the humanitarian and existential aspects for those religious minorities.
It is not aid for religious reasons. Rather, it is aid for those who were most targeted by ISIS.
While President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have irrefutably been outspoken voices for persecuted Christians, when it came to the question of direct aid to survivors of ISIS genocide, they also had the weight of a bipartisan congressional mandate behind them.
A central part of ProPublica’s premise is the tired notion that giving direct aid to religious minorities would create unnecessary sectarian tension between Christians and their Muslim majority neighbors and put a target on their back as the benefactors of an unpopular United States. This has never really been borne out by reality.
The reality was that Christians and Yazidis were on the brink of extinction in northern Iraq, their ancestral homeland, and desperate for assistance from anyone who would provide it. The U.S. would not be putting a target on Christians and Yazidis by giving them direct aid. On the contrary, they would be trying to keep ISIS from final victory in their genocidal campaign to wipe out these communities.
Let us make no mistake; ISIS is the one that put a target on the backs of Christians and Yazidis, in some cases by literally spray-painting the Arabic letter Nune on the doors of Christian families to mark them for persecution. I regularly speak with the communities in northern Iraq, and there is no evidence that USAID sending direct aid to religious minority communities has led to an increase in sectarian tensions.
What’s more, the idea that we are showing these communities favoritism because they are Christian is absolutely counterfactual. The U.S. has invested billions in rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure and literally hundreds of billions in security assistance to the Iraqi military. Do we have to apologize for USAID spending a small fraction of those billions to help the survivors of genocide? And if U.S. humanitarian assistance does not exist to support the most vulnerable of individuals and communities, why does it exist at all?
While the Christian community in the U.S. has certainly been sympathetic to the plight of Christians in the region, they have not done so to the exclusion of other minority communities. In fact, it was Christian groups ringing the fire bells in Washington over the genocide in Iraq who helped bring Yazidis to the attention of the Obama administration. Before ISIS targeted Yazidis, sources tell me that official State Department documents incorrectly categorized Yazidis as a Christian sect, showing the woeful lack of information in the U.S. government about their community.
The ProPublica author reports that only 2%-3% of the Iraqi population is made up of religious minorities such as Christians and Yazidis, so we should not give them more attention than they are due. This point is simultaneously tone-deaf and misleading. It is tone-deaf because it fails to mention that the Christian population has declined precipitously over the past 10 years due to persecution. It is misleading in that it does not account for the fact that Christians and Yazidis make up a significant portion of Iraq’s displaced people, despite them only accounting for a small percentage of the total population.
Another misleading claim ProPublica makes is suggesting that the United Nations was doing exemplary work in northern Iraq and that USAID cut in and took away their pledged funding for no valid reason. While the U.N. did successfully complete a few larger infrastructure projects and continues to do work in the region, anyone who was communicating with Christians and Yazidis on the ground in 2016 and 2017 knows that the U.N. was woefully negligent in helping suffering genocide survivors. It was simply not positioned to provide the support these communities needed.
In October 2017, In Defense of Christians, where I am president, produced a report countering a number of misleading claims made by the U.N. about their work in northern Iraq. One paragraph stated:
The ProPublica piece also suggests the whole idea of providing direct aid to religious minority communities who had suffered genocide was something invented by Pence to throw a bone to his base. This is yet another ahistorical suggestion. In reality, a bipartisan bill passed the House of Representatives months before Pence’s announcement of direct aid at the IDC 2017 National Summit.
Every administration takes the prerogative to direct some USAID funding to issues they believe are important. The Obama administration directed money to many projects all over the world without any congressional backing to stand on.
Counter to what ProPublica wrote, this direct aid has taken longer to be delivered to religious minority organizations than many hoped it would. There is still much that must be done to help Christians and Yazidis in Iraq if we are going to save these communities from actual extinction in the next 50 years, a bleak reality the ProPublica author ignores. If there were employees of USAID who were dragging their feet or refusing to implement a law passed by Congress, then perhaps they were not suitably employed, as their responsibility is to dispense taxpayer’s money at the direction of taxpayer’s elected officials.
The piece specifically attacked the credibility of a small group that was awarded their first project with USAID. The author cherry-picks a single donor to the organization in an attempt to paint the full group as anti-Islam.
If the author had looked into the work of the group more closely, they would have discovered that they turn out large groups of volunteers to do service projects in northern Iraq that benefit everyone, Arabs and Kurds included. It is very troubling to see it suggested that an Assyrian Christian whose community had just suffered genocide at the hands of radical Sunni Muslims, and who is now doing service projects that will also benefit their Sunni neighbors, is anti-Islam and should not partner with USAID.
It is sickening to see aid to a community that suffered genocide, such as the Christians and Yazidis in Iraq, politicized in an attempt to score a point against the Trump administration. Such behavior is shameful. USAID should lean into their congressional mandate to help Christians and Yazidis who survived genocide, not be distracted by ill-informed criticism. The work they are doing is too important for distractions.
Toufic Baaklini is president and chairman of the board at In Defense of Christians.
