Richard L. Russell
Crisis Magazine
The Middle East is embroiled in chaos and what little remains of the ancient Christian communities there are being destroyed with the latest tragic turn of events in Iraq. The barbarism of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) that began a sweeping military and terror campaign from Syria swept into Iraq to capture numerous towns and Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city in June 2014 to practically erase the post-World War I border between Syria and Iraq. ISIS declared itself an Islamic State with its capital in Mosul and is now brutally cleansing its territory of Christians, a humanitarian horror and outrage that is largely ignored by Western countries, including the United States.
Western elites welcomed the “Arab spring” which began shaking the foundations of authoritarian political power throughout the Middle East in 2011 as heralding an era of democracy and freedoms in the region. A bitter paradox is that, contrary to Western hopes, the brutal and despicable authoritarian regimes of the past such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Hafez Assad’s in Syria provided more freedoms to Christian minorities than do the security environments in those countries today.
The fall of Mosul was a watershed event for imperiled Middle East Christians. In consolidating control of the city, ISIS in July issued demands to Christians read out in the city’s mosques to convert to Islam or pay taxes or “dhimma” to avoid being killed. One of the senior Christian leaders in Iraq reported that ISIS had been marking Christian homes with the letter “N” for “Nassarah,” a term used for Christians in the Koran. The terrorizing led to a mass exodus of Christians from Mosul to Kurdish controlled territory in Iraq, leaving Mosul vacant of Christians for the first time in Iraq’s history.
Richard L. Russell is Non-Resident Senior Fellow for Strategic Studies at the Center for the National Interest. A Catholic convert, Russell holds a Ph.D. in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia and specializes in foreign policy and international security. He is the author of three books: Sharpening Strategic Intelligence (Cambridge University Press); Weapons Proliferation and War in the Greater Middle East (Routledge); and, George F. Kennan’s Strategic Thought(Praeger). Follow him on Twitter @DrRLRussell.
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