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Holy Week resources and reflections

Yazidis and Christians forced to flee their homes in Iraq: A conversation with Jonah Salim

Jonah Salim
Jonah Salim

It’s difficult news to comprehend: ISIS militants in Iraq forcing Yazidis (an Iraqi religious minority) and Christians to flee their homes, whole families running for their lives to Mount Sinjar in the northern part of the country, with some who did not escape being lined up and killed. There are also reports of women and young girls being held separately – transported from their families by bus and truck, reputedly in an effort to coerce them to convert and become the wives or sexual conquests of Iraqi militants.

For many, this is a surreal reality gleaned from news reports from far across the world.

For Jonah Salim, these are stories he hears firsthand in nightly phone calls with his aunt and other relatives. Salim, who in 2009 became the first Iraqi to become a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), has family immediately affected by the crisis – including his parents, now in Kurdistan, and his widowed aunt, who helped to raise him and who he considers like a second mother, and her two young adult children.

“ISIS went into their village and they dispelled some of the people from the village,” Salim said of his aunt. “They had to run . . . They had no option except to run,” leaving everything behind. They stayed in the mountains for several days with no food or water, and then found a house in the valley to camp in – 11 families sleeping on the floor of a single room.

Salim, a native of a kurdish village in Neneveh, converted to Christianity (the only member of his family to do so); attended seminary and was ordained in Egypt; and later was granted asylum in the United States, fearing persecution if he returned to Iraq. In 2009, the Presbytery of Lake Huron accepted the transfer of his ordination into the PC(USA). He served churches in Michigan and Illinois; in 2010 earned a doctor of ministry degree from McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago; and currently is studying for a doctorate in psychology and ethicology (Christian ethics), specializing in trauma. Now 38, Salim became a U.S. citizen last February and is a member of the Presbytery of Chicago.

His concern now: what will happen to the members of his family and others who were forced to flee from ISIS – losing everything along the way. His aunt lived in a village of about 5,000 people, and when the Kurdish army collapsed people ran into the streets – Yazidis and Christians – “screaming ‘Escape, they are coming!’ ” Almost immediately, ISIS militants stormed the town and the gunfire began.

“They left everything behind, all their possessions,” Salim said. “Literally, all they have is their cell phones.”

One of his aunt’s neighbors, a man in his 70s ill with cancer, was unable to run, and told his family to “go, run, I already have cancer and I’m already going to die.” The militants captured him, and “they not only executed him, they slaughtered him in a very inhumane way,” Salim said. Another family – parents and their six children – also was caught, and Salim said the ISIS fighters told the parents “ ‘If you do not convert (to Islam), we will kill you.’ They executed all of them, from five years old to the parents, they executed all of them in their dining room. It’s so traumatic . . . This is literally a religious war against minorities, Christians and Kurds.”

Salim grew up in the Yazidi faith – an ancient Kurdish religious group, centered in the Nineveh province in northern Iraq and influenced over time by Zoroastrianism, Christianity and other faiths, but whose practitioners are not viewed as a “people of the book” protected by Islamic law. In an email, Salim wrote that “my parents, my aunt and so many other Yadizis and Christians have lost their homes” and left everything because of ISIS.

ISIS militants “have killed Yazidis who could not escape from their village due to illness or disability or were unable to run,” he wrote. Bodies are left in the streets; families are unable to bury their dead. ISIS fighters have taken women, “including little children for sexual abuse.” Parents are told “if you do not convert to Islam, we will kill your kids.”

Yazidi temples have been destroyed; “they have destroyed churches of our old Christianity in Iraq, raping women and sell them as slaves.”

Salim wrote that “the trauma that my parents and aunts and their children, and all Yazidis and Christians who are suffering right now, is a trauma of injustice . . . They wanted to steal their religion from them by giving them two choices: convert to Islam or being killed. The trauma of genocide against Yazidis has made huge impact on the identity of Yazidis, their sense of humanity and their human dignity. The genocide that was an attack on their sense of safety and selfhood. The mother saw her son getting executed in front of her eyes and she couldn’t do anything; the family lost their house which ISIS destroyed it for nothing wrong they have done to deserve that; the father saw his wife is taken from him by ISIS for sexual abuse and rape; and the parents saw their little children getting killed by ISIS for not being willing to convert to Islam; thousands of Yazidis stayed for days without water and food on the mountains of Kurdistan.

“Their humanity has been stolen, but even murdered by ISIS. Yazidis and Christians had nothing to look for, other than asking God to help them survive. Their faith in God, becomes their only source of hope, in the midst of such disaster where hope can be not found for many. They were living dead, but what makes them alive is the little hope they have that God can help them to survive. They found no truth in the genocide other than it is happening for real by the name of religion. In fact, their only truth remains in God. That truth of their faith in God becomes hope for peace for them. Their faith in God becomes the source for a courage which conquers part of the negativity of giving up.

“What can our PC(USA) do to help?” he asked.

First, pray for those who are suffering and for the violence to end.

Salim also hopes Presbyterians and others in the United States will pay attention to what’s happening in Iraq – and pressure the U.S. government and humanitarian and political forces around the world to provide refugee status in either the United States or Europe for those who have been forced to flee.

His aunt, who worked for the postal service, has not received a salary for months. His father, who is retired, cannot receive his pension. They have no access to bank accounts. Many who fled never had a passport, not expecting to travel abroad, and now the embassies of many countries are closed.

“My aunt – she tells me that people there do not have faith to go back to their homes,” even if the fighting subsides, Salim said. “I ask them all the time, ‘What do you need?’ They tell me, ‘We do not belong to this place anymore. We do not have security; we lost the sense of security.’ ”

His aunt is around 50 years old. She told him: “I used to believe this is my country and I should never leave my country. But now I do believe that this is not a country that can provide me freedom and safety and security, for me and for my kids.”

Her son, Salim’s cousin, recently graduated with honors from an esteemed university. He told Salim that “I dreamed that I would teach here in the university, and I worked so hard, so I could get good grades and could get this position. Now I feel I’ve lost my dream. I don’t have a dream anymore.”

 

 

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