The Islamic State is threatening Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East to an unprecedented extent, and activists are warning that quick action is needed to keep the ancient communities from being wiped out.
Aside from the hundreds of thousands of people killed or displaced by the extremist group, priceless cultural artifacts including churches, monasteries and shrines have been destroyed.
“The persecution our community is facing is the most brutal in our history. Not only have we been robbed of our homes, property and land, but our heritage is being destroyed as well,” Diana Momeka, a Catholic nun from the Islamic State-occupied city of Mosul, Iraq, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday.
“Your history is gone and you are nothing anymore. That’s how we see ourselves now: Homeless.”
Though the U.S.-led international coalition fighting the extremist group has had some success in stemming its relentless assault on religious minorities in Iraq and Syria, most notably last year’s rescue of some 50,000 Iraqi Yazidis trapped in the Sinjar Mountains, the efforts may not be moving fast enough to stave off their extinction.
“The administration’s response to degrade and destroy [the Islamic State] is a good start, but it’s a start,” said Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, arguing for faster action to protect both religious minorities and their heritage.
The United Nations and other human rights groups have documented numerous crimes against religious minorities by the Islamic State, including killings, torture, rape and sexual slavery, the taking of hostages, forced religious conversions and the conscription of children.
A U.N. report released in March noted that the Islamic State appeared intent on destroying the Yazidis, an ancient religious group in Iraq, to the point that “strongly suggests” the group has committed genocide.
Another report in February by the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative, a new religious-freedom group, noted that the Christian population of Iraq had dropped from 1.5 million to 300,000 in the past decade, under pressure of sectarian persecution, which has accelerated with the rise of the Islamic State.
“With the fall of Mosul and surrounding areas in the summer of 2014, Iraq’s minorities have no place to go and are nearing the precipice of total disappearance,” the report said.
Meanwhile, the looting of religious and cultural sites by the Islamic State has been so bad that it’s difficult to put a value on it, said Katharyn Hanson, a cultural heritage expert at the University of Pennsylvania who is studying the issue.
“You have to assume the lowest estimates have to be staggering,” she said.
Fellow Arabs and Muslims have noticed the effect of the Islamic State’s scorched-earth policy against religious minorities.
“An Arab world without its Christian communities will be more insular, more rigid, less hospitable and more desolate,” Al Arabiya Washington bureau chief Hisham Melham wrote Feb. 28 in an essay on “The Twilight of Middle Eastern Christianity.”
The Foreign Affairs panel on April 23 unanimously approved a bill by Engel that would allow the United States to impose restrictions on the imports of cultural property from Syria similar to those already imposed to discourage the market in looted treasures from Iraq.
Lawmakers and activists want similar action to help stem the extermination of minority communities, with proposals including a change in U.S. policy to ship arms directly to Iraqi Kurdish forces, who are best-positioned and have proven most effective at protecting them from threat, and a “safe haven” in Syria enforced by U.S. airpower.
An effective solution is one that avoids inflaming sectarian passions and takes into account the Muslim suffering from the Islamic State’s terrorism and the dictatorship of Syrian President Bashar Assad, said Hind Kabawat, director of interfaith peacebuilding at the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University.
“The message to minorities in the Middle East should be one of inclusion,” she said, noting that it’s the only sustainable way to defeat extremism and dictatorship in the Middle East.
“One of the salient and most disturbing aspects of the modern Middle East (this is true of Arabs, Turks, Israelis and Iranians) is the extent of atomization that we have allowed ourselves to succumb to,” Melham wrote. “We only feel the pain of our own tribe, or sect or ethnicity.”
