Pope Francis said that he is going to Iraq as a penitential pilgrim, asking God’s forgiveness for the years of war and violence that have afflicted Iraq, and as a pilgrim of peace.

Pope John Paul II had vigorously opposed Bush’s Iraq War.

The Pope was invited to the country by President Barham Salih, who hoped the pontiff’s visit would have a calming effect.

Iraq is now thought to have about 300,000 Christians, some 1 percent of the population. Before the Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003 the number was said to have been 800,000 (and then the Iraqi population was smaller). The US invasion and occupation created a power vacuum in the country that saw the rise of extremist groups. Because Americans were the enemy and Occupier, and are mostly Christian, extremists began targeting Iraqi Christians (whose families had been there for a millennium and a half and who had nothing to do with the United States). Many have fled to Beirut or Detroit. Most remaining Iraqi Christians are Roman Catholics who recognize the Pope but have retained their own Syriac liturgy.

The Pope said that he was sure that the correct teachings of the religions call for holding to the values of peace, brotherhood and humanity. He said on his arrival in Baghdad, “We must concentrate on what unites us rather than what leads to our division.” He expressed concern about the pandemic, but said it was an opportunity to think about the pattern of our lives and existence. He urged that the vaccine be distributed in a fair and equitable manner.

He urged Muslims to embrace the Christians in their midst. (Muslims are supposed to do this anyway, since they recognized Christians and Jews as fellow monotheists and “people of the Book” with a divine scripture).

Addressing the violence that has plagued the region in recent decades, Pope Francis denounced the fundamentalism that rejects coexistence as having brought death, destruction, and ruins visible to the eye.

He referred to the travails of the Izadi (Yazidi) Kurds, who were attacked by the ISIL terrorist group, describing what happened to them as headlong barbarism and entire lack of humanity. He deplored the Izadis’ potential loss of identity and described cultural and religious diversity as priceless and valuable, not something anyone should strive to end.

He urged rebuilding and striving for a more just world for coming generations. He said respect for rights and safeguarding all the religious communities in the world was necessary to achieve peace and harmony. He added, “enough of violence and extremism.” He said God calls us to love, not to displacement and terrorism.

He especially thanked those charitable organizations who are helping to rebuild Iraq and to help the millions of displaced.

Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi tweeted, “With all love and peace both the Iraqi people and government welcome His Holiness Pope Francis, to emphasize the depth of the human bonds that are and have been historically centered on the lands of Mesopotamia, where religions and intellectual currents and common human values meet. Greetings to His Holiness in the land of Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, and the prophets and saints.”

The biblical figure Abraham is said in the Bible to be from Ur in what is now Iraq, and the Pope will visit his supposed birthplace. In the Bible, as well, Jonah was said to have preached in Ninevah in what is now northern Iraq, and the country is the site of one of the earliest Christian communities, which at one time comprised a good deal of the population, under the Sasanian Iranian empire and then under the Muslim caliphates.

President Barham Salih, of Kurdish heritage, hosted the pope in the presidential palace in the high-security Green Zone.

Even the Shiite militias welcomed the pope, and Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, usually anti-Western, tweeted his regards.

Pope Francis also visited the priests, nuns and other church officials of the Our Lady of Salvation church in the upper middle class Karrada district. He was presented with the dossiers on the 48 Christians who were murdered there by the radical ISIL terrorist group, as well as information about other ISIS atrocities.

The pope will visit five provinces or governorates, including Ninewah, as well as the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where he will meet Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, whom many Shiites around the world consider their leader, except in Iran where there are many ayatollahs who compete for the loyalty of the laity. The pope arrived in Najaf on Saturday morning.

Baghdad was put under curfew for the visit. I attended a conference held by the Iraqi ministry of culture in 2013 in Baghdad, and our kind Iraqi hosts took us on excursions in the city, including to Karrada. They packed us in white vans and surrounded us with army vehicles that made the commuters get out of the way on the highway so as to forestall any attempt by terrorists to block the street and attack us. If the security was so good for a few dozen professors, I’m sure it is air tight for Pope Francis.

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Bonus Video:

ABC: “Pope Francis visits Iraq”

To deport Iraqi Christians, Trump’s immigration officials rely on testimony saying they won’t be at particular risk. But to justify funding and attention, officials elsewhere in the administration say the Christians face grave danger.

(ProPublica) – Even as U.S. immigration officials have pushed to deport hundreds of Iraqi Christians over the last few years, asserting in court that they are unlikely to be targeted in their homeland, another arm of the Trump administration has insisted just the opposite, saying that Christians in Iraq face terror and extortion.

Last September, a senior Trump appointee at the U.S. Agency for International Development told a government commission that in the part of northern Iraq where many Christians live, militias aligned with Iran “terrorize those families brave enough to have returned, extort local businesses and openly pledge allegiance to Iran.”

In some towns, the numbers of Christians who have returned after the defeat of the Islamic State “have reached only 1 to 2% because of persecution by these militias,” said the official, Hallam Ferguson. “While the Iraqi government has pledged to rein in these militias, they continue to operate with impunity in many areas, with the authorities seemingly unable or unwilling to confront them.”

The same day, a Middle East expert completed a sworn declaration at the request of the Department of Homeland Security for use in its efforts to deport Iraqis. The American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin argued that despite a recent history of American occupation, terrorist attacks and the violent takeover of large swaths of the country by Islamic State militants, Iraq is now a more stable country with an increasingly professional government.

Iraqi Christians could count on the state’s protection and are “largely immune” from politically motivated violence, Rubin wrote.

“For the past several years, Iraq’s Shi’ite-majority government and security forces have worked to secure Christian churches and Christian neighborhoods,” Rubin wrote. “It is the elected Iraqi government which is now in control of Iraq.”

Government lawyers have submitted Rubin’s statement — along with similar declarations by two other experts — to courts during immigration hearings. The Rubin declaration was submitted by DHS lawyers as recently as last month.

The assessments by Rubin and the other experts can have significant consequences.

The administration has sought to deport hundreds of Iraqis, many of them Christians, who immigrated to the U.S. years ago. To stay in the U.S., many of the Iraqis have to prove that if they are deported, they are most likely to be tortured by, or with the tacit permission of, the Iraqi government — a higher standard than what is used in typical asylum cases. That gives DHS a strong incentive to emphasize Iraq’s progress and portray the country’s government as competent and willing to protect all its people.

President Donald Trump said in a January speech in Michigan that he would grant an “extension” to Iraqi Christians facing deportation, but DHS’ effort to deport the Iraqis is ongoing, lawyers said.

In approving one Iraqi Christian’s deportation late last year, an immigration judge wrote that he found the experts’ declarations “persuasive” and was convinced that “the Iraqi government has cracked down” on abuses by the majority-Shiite Muslim militias that helped defeat the Islamic State but have not disbanded since its demise.

In an emailed response to questions, Rubin said that he does not agree with the Trump administration’s policy of deporting the Iraqis, but that he had been asked for an informed assessment and not his political opinion.

“The only question I focus on when contributing declarations or when asked in court is whether Christians returning to Iraq are likely to be subject to detention, torture or murder upon their return, and the answer to that objectively is no,” Rubin said.

Rubin said he plans to update his statement to address recent unrest in Iraq, where there have been widespread demonstrations and the killing of hundreds of mostly unarmed protesters.

The two other experts who took similar positions as Rubin, Denise Natali and Douglas Ollivant, did not respond to requests for comment. Natali is now a senior State Department official.

The State Department, USAID, DHS and the White House did not respond to requests for comment, and the Iraqi Embassy in Washington did not offer a response either.

While the Iraqi government has succeeded in defeating the Islamic State and winning back control of its territory, and does not itself engage in persecuting minority groups, religious and ethnic minorities have little faith the government can protect them against a multitude of active, semiofficial armed groups, experts said.

“My view aligns more closely with USAID,” said Steven Cook, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, who visited Iraq in December. “Iraq seems to be in a situation of terminal collapse. With the continued presence of extremists and the unreliable central government, I find it hard to believe that Christians are safe and secure.”

Lawyers for the deportees have also filed declarations from human rights experts arguing that the deportees would be at risk of detention and abuse.

The Trump administration has frequently highlighted the dangers faced by Christians to support its decision to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid for them and other religious minorities in Iraq and Syria.

The cause is especially popular with Trump’s conservative Christian base, which he is seeking to solidify ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Vice President Mike Pence, in particular, has made this issue a priority. Starting in 2017, his aides pressured USAID to direct more funds to religious minorities in Iraq, including Christians. A ProPublica investigation last year found that, under pressure from Pence and in contravention of USAID regulations, political appointees were closely involved in deciding grants in Iraq that went to Christian groups.

In a September 2019 interview, Ferguson said the U.S. was “pretty disappointed” with the Iraqi government. “One could argue that they’re kind of standing by amidst the continued ethnic cleansing of northern Iraq.”

Via ProPublica

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

WDIV 4 Detroit: “Court ruling paves way for deportation of Iraqi detainees”

The Iraqi street crowds want an end to the corruption of the ruling political parties, and have just achieved a major change in electoral rules so that voters will be able to vote for individuals rather than for party lists.

The Iraqi Christian community may have been 3 percent of the population before the Bush administration inflicted decades of chaos on the country. The terrorist ISIL group viciously attacked them, forcing many to flee to Lebanon and Europe. It is estimated that roughly 150,000 Christians remain in Iraq today. Their situation is much improved now that ISIL has been defeated as a territorial state, but they remain in a fragile mood.

Christians in the Middle East are disproportionately concentrated in a few countries, especially Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel & Palestine, and Iraq. In the general vicinity, South Sudan and Ethiopia are majority Christian and Eritrea is about a third.

Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:

Juan Cole
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(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)

Christians in Lebanon are also have a sombre holy day report Dala Osseiran and Alaa Kanaan at Reuters. Like Iraq, Lebanon has been wracked with popular protests this fall, which pushed prime minister Saad Hariri to resign. Financial mismanagement has left the country’s banks tottering, and the economy has turned sharply down. Lebanon, with a citizen population of 4.6 million and a million Syrian refugees. The country has an enormous tourism sector and also usually benefits from visits by expatriates. But the turmoil of the demonstrations has discouraged those visitors from coming, harming the economy even more. Many Christians are not putting up new decorations this year, but recycling last year’s.

Some Christians have also turned the holiday to latent political purposes, preparing Christmas dinner for the protesters in the street.

In Syria, where Christians before the war were thought to form 10% of the population, the defeat of the radical ISIL group has brought jubilation. Most Syrian Christians tacitly support the Bashar al-Assad Baathist regime, since it is secular and doesn’t persecute them, over the fundamentalist Sunni rebels. (This doesn’t mean Christians actively support Bashar). Thousands of Christians came into the streets this year in Aleppo, the country’s second largest city, to express their jubilation at the defeat of ISIL.

On the other hand, Christians in Qamishli in the northeast Kurdish region of Syria are worried about the Turkish incursion. Some Christian militias had fought alongside the Kurdish YPG in the Syrian Democratic Forces backed by the US, against ISIL. Now Trump has abandoned them and they fear the effects of the Turkish invasion.

Egypt has the biggest Christian population, estimated at between 6% and 10% of the population of 100 million. That is, if Egyptian Christians were their own country, they could be a Switzerland or Austria demographically. Some journalists have argued that Christianity is disappearing from the Middle East, and there certainly has been a fall in the proportion of Christians along with recent displacement by war and terrorism in Iraq and Syria. But the whole population of the Ottoman Empire in 1881 was 17.5 million, so today’s Egyptian Christians would be like 40% of the total population of the region of that time. I know it is a hard thing to convey, but the upshot is that in absolute numbers Middle Eastern Christianity is huge today compared to 140 years ago, even if they are proportionally fewer– and even though it is true that there is ongoing substantial out-migration.

Officials at USAID warned that favoring Christian groups in Iraq could be unconstitutional and inflame religious tensions. When one colleague lost her job, they said she had been “Penced.”

Last November, a top Trump appointee at the U.S. Agency for International Development wrote a candid email to colleagues about pressure from the White House to reroute Middle East aid to religious minorities, particularly Christian groups.

“Sometimes this decision will be made for us by the White House (see… Iraq! And, increasingly, Syria),” said Hallam Ferguson, a senior official in USAID’s Middle East bureau, in an email seen by ProPublica. “We need to stay ahead of this curve everywhere lest our interventions be dictated to us.”

The email underscored what had become a stark reality under the Trump White House. Decisions about U.S. aid are often no longer being governed by career professionals applying a rigorous review of applicants and their capabilities. Over the last two years, political pressure, particularly from the office of Vice President Mike Pence, had seeped into aid deliberations and convinced key decision-makers that unless they fell in line, their jobs could be at stake.

Five months before Ferguson sent the email, his former boss had been ousted following a mandate from Pence’s chief of staff. Pence had grown displeased with USAID’s work in Iraq after Christian groups were turned down for aid.

ProPublica viewed internal emails and conducted interviews with nearly 40 current and former U.S. officials and aid professionals that shed new light on the success of Pence and his allies in influencing the government’s long-standing process for awarding foreign aid. Most people spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Trump administration’s efforts to influence USAID funding sparked concern from career officials, who worried the agency risked violating constitutional prohibitions on favoring one religion over another. They also were concerned that being perceived as favoring Christians could worsen Iraq’s sectarian divides.

“There are very deliberate procurement guidelines that have developed over a number of years to guard precisely against this kind of behavior,” said Steven Feldstein, a former State Department and USAID official during the Obama administration. When politics intrude on the grant-making process, “you’re diluting the very nature of what development programs ought to accomplish.”

USAID regulations state that awards “must be free from political interference or even the appearance of such interference and must be made on the basis of merit, not on the basis of the religious affiliation of a recipient organization, or lack thereof.”

Last month, USAID announced two grants to Iraqi organizations that career officials had previously rejected. Political appointees significantly impacted the latest awards, according to interviews with officials and other people aware of the process. Typically, such appointees have little to no involvement in USAID grants, to avoid perceptions of undue political influence on procurement.

One of the groups selected for the newest awards has no full-time paid staff, no experience with government grants and a financial tie that would typically raise questions in an intense competition for limited funds. The second organization received its first USAID direct grant after extensive public comments by its leader and allies highlighting what they described as a lack of U.S. assistance to Christians. The two groups — a charity that primarily serves Christian Iraqis and a Catholic university — were not originally listed as front-runners, according to a document seen by ProPublica.

The Wall Street Journal and BuzzFeed have previously reported Pence’s interest in increasing foreign aid to Christians and his displeasure with USAID’s activities in Iraq.

Pence’s spokeswoman, Katie Waldman, did not respond to questions. A USAID spokeswoman did not respond to specific questions, including about Ferguson’s email, but said the latest grants were appropriate.

“The Trump Administration has made responding to the genocide committed by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) against religious and ethnic minorities a top priority,” said the spokeswoman, Pooja Jhunjhunwala. “Assistance to religious and ethnic communities targeted by ISIS is not a departure from the norm, but rather a continuation of USAID’s rich history of promoting inclusive development and defending human dignity and religious freedom in our partner countries.”

Approximately 97% of Iraq’s population is Muslim, according to the most recent U.S. figures available. Religious minorities — including Christians, Yazidis and others — make up around 2% to 3% of Iraq’s total population.

The Trump administration’s efforts to steer funding to these minorities in Iraq stand in stark contrast to its overall approach to foreign aid. It has repeatedly proposed cutting U.S. diplomatic and foreign assistance budgets by billions of dollars. In August, as the White House was considering cuts to an array of foreign aid programs, it shielded funding for religious minorities abroad, according to newsaccounts.

As Trump mounts a 2020 reelection effort, he is taking steps to solidify his conservative Christian base, including his decision last week to install his spiritual adviser, Florida televangelist Paula White, in a White House position. Increasing aid to Christians abroad is a core value for his supporters.

In a speech last month at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, a major gathering of the religious right, Trump touted his administration’s work on behalf of religious minorities in Iraq and Syria.

“Other presidents would not be doing that,” he said. “They’d be spending a lot more money, but they’d be spending it on things that would not make you very happy.”

Late in the Obama administration, USAID’s activities in Iraq focused on an effort by the United Nations to restore basic services as soon as cities had been liberated from Islamic State rule.

By the end of 2016, the United States had contributed over $115 million to the effort through USAID, and other countries had contributed hundreds of millions of dollars more. U.S. officials credit the U.N.’s work with enabling millions of Iraqis to return to their homes soon after the fighting was done instead of languishing in refugee camps.

“Here’s another example of when the U.N. and the United States work together, really good things can happen,” said John Allen, the former special presidential envoy to the global coalition formed to defeat ISIS, at an event at the Brookings Institution in September.

Robust U.S. support for the U.N.’s work initially carried over into the Trump administration. In July 2017, the administration announced that USAID would provide an additional $150 million to the U.N. Development Program’s Iraq stabilization fund, bringing the total U.S. contribution to more than $265 million since 2015.

But by then, U.S. officials in Iraq were sensing dissatisfaction among some Iraqi Christians and American religious groups with the U.S. strategy and the U.N.’s work. Trying to head off problems, U.S. officials urged the U.N. in the summer of 2017 to pay special attention to the Nineveh Plains, an ethnically and religiously diverse region of northern Iraq where many of the country’s Christians live.

U.N. officials were reluctant, arguing their assistance could go further in dense urban areas like Mosul, as opposed to the Nineveh Plains, a stretch of farmland dotted by small towns and villages.

“They were going for the biggest bang for the buck,” one former U.S. foreign service officer said.

Dylan Lowthian, a UNDP spokesman, said the agency worked closely with local Christian leaders in 2017 to encourage more people to return to the Nineveh Plains.

“UNDP is one of the largest supporters of minority communities in Iraq in terms of volume of projects, impact, and funding,” Lowthian said.

But the pressure from Washington built. Influential religious groups like the Knights of Columbus and current and former Republican members of Congress advocated throughout 2017 for direct U.S. aid to religious minorities, including Christians and Yazidis. They said that the groups merited special attention because they had been targeted for genocide by Islamic State and that local churches had proven track records of delivering aid quickly and reliably. Furthermore, Christians — who fled the country in droves after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq — were at risk of disappearing from Iraq altogether if they didn’t receive help, they argued.

Bashar Warda, a powerful archbishop based in Erbil, Iraq, was a key figure in this effort. “The Christians of Iraq desperately need American government humanitarian aid now, and we need it to be delivered in a manner to ensure it actually reaches us and does not get absorbed and redirected in the existing aid structures,” he said in a 2017 interview withCrux, a Catholic- focused publication. “While the U.S. has donated generously to the overall humanitarian aid effort in Iraq, almost none of this aid reached the Christians.”

Warda met with Pence in late 2017 and stood beside Trump in the Oval Office in 2018 as he signed a bill authorizing the State Department and USAID to provide relief to victims of Islamic State, particularly religious minorities. Warda had advocated for the bill’s passage.

Warda’s and others’ argument on the flow of aid resonated with the Trump administration’s distrust of multilateral organizations, especially the U.N., and a desire to help Christians worldwide.

Many career officials at the State Department and USAID supported the broader scope of the U.N.’s work. They acknowledged it wasn’t perfect — it could be slow, and the U.N. was not adept at communicating with local communities — but said the rebuilding had benefited wide swaths of territory that included both Muslims and minority groups.

Privately, some officials felt that Warda’s and his allies’ lobbying efforts in Washington were downplaying how the U.N. projects benefited their communities. And serving Iraq’s Sunni Muslims, they said, was essential to ensuring that Islamic State, which drew its ranks from Sunnis, did not make a resurgence.

“We were focused on the overriding policy priority of making sure that areas where young men with guns and other weapons were wandering around got the vast majority of the funding,” one current U.S. official said in an interview.

As of July, USAID and the State Department had announced nearly $373 million in funding for “persecuted ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq” since 2017. Jhunjhunwala, the USAID spokeswoman, said the U.S. government had provided over $1.5 billion in assistance to Iraq in 2017 and 2018, “the vast majority in areas inhabited by Sunni and Shia Muslims.” The Obama administration did not publicize its spending on Iraqi religious groups in the same way, making an exact comparison difficult.

Stephen Rasche, who works closely with Warda and serves as his spokesman, told ProPublica that U.N. reports detailing its rebuilding work in 2016 and 2017 “were highly misleading and could not be substantiated as they applied to assistance in the Christian towns.”

“In all our interactions with State/AID they were relying almost exclusively on the U.N. reports rather than making their own, first-hand inspections,” he said in an emailed statement. “Our position was that we were there on the ground and could not find evidence of the work that the U.N. said was being done.”

Lowthian said that all UNDP projects are tracked by a “rigorous and robust” monitoring effort, and that project details are shared regularly with partner countries.

Career officials also expressed concerns at the time that targeting federal funds toward particular minority groups on the basis of religion could be unconstitutional. USAID rules bar providing funding for explicitly religious activities such as worship or proselytizing. But faith-based groups can still receive U.S. funding, as long as they are inclusive and do not use the funds for religious programming.

USAID regulations mirror the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause, which broadly prohibits government actions that favor one religion over another. Over time, Trump appointees have grown exasperated at pushback that mentioned the clause, one official said.

“They find it very constraining,” this person said. “They get frustrated that we can’t just do direct support.” Still, several officials said, career attorneys at USAID painstakingly review its programming in Iraq to ensure it is legal.

And USAID and State Department officials questioned whether Christian groups were significantly needier than the broader Iraqi population victimized by Islamic State, including Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

“There was a pushback, a feeling like we shouldn’t be doing this, first of all because of our own policies and regulations, and secondly because they’re not worse off than the others,” a former USAID official said.

Initially, Pence’s office and political appointees at USAID were focused on helping Christians, with little attention to Yazidis, a small, ancient sect that was targeted in an especially cruel manner by Islamic State militants, said a current official and a former foreign service officer. Over time, career officials “helped educate” political appointees on the extent of the Yazidis’ suffering, in hopes of getting their support for directing some aid at non-Christian groups, the former foreign service officer said.

“There was a very ideological focus on Christians, and most of the questions were about Christians,” this person said. “We were trying to get them to focus on others in the minority communities that might need assistance.”

Some also felt that if the U.S. were perceived as openly favoring particular groups, it could lead to further tensions in a country with deep and complicated sectarian divisions. Even some Christian Iraqis, several current or former U.S. officials said, did not want to be singled out by USAID for help, because they feared that preferential treatment would only add to instability.

But Trump appointees at USAID in favor of sending more aid to Christians — including Middle East bureau official Hallam Ferguson and Bill Steiger, the agency’s chief of staff — discounted career officers’ concerns, arguing that they had heard differently from the Christian groups focused on Iraq with whom they were in touch, one former USAID official said. Trump appointees “seemed convinced that an imbalance did exist” in how Christians were being treated, a U.S. official said.

Steiger, who served at the Department of Health and Human Services during the George W. Bush administration, has been a key conduit through which Pence’s office has exerted pressure on USAID, several officials said.

Trump appointees in Washington pressed officials to frequently visit the areas where Christians lived, seemingly unaware of the weeks of preparation and security logistics needed to make even one such visit happen, one current U.S. official and the former foreign service officer said.

By September 2017, Steiger was holding meetings with USAID officials to discuss how to help religious minorities in Iraq. And by early October, USAID’s leadership had decided to try to satisfy Pence’s preferences through new grants focusing on northern Iraq.

While the grant process was being worked out at USAID, Pence blindsided officials in October 2017 when he declared to an influential Christian group in Washington that Trump had ordered diplomats to no longer fund “ineffective” U.N. programs. USAID would now directly help persecuted communities, he said.

“It sent us scrambling the next day,” one U.S. official working on Iraq at the time said. “That seemed to me, in retrospect, a turning point in saying, ‘We’ve got a real interest in doing more to help minorities, especially Christians,’ to, ‘OK, now we’re really going to shift some funds.’”

The $150 million that USAID had pledged to the U.N. effort in Iraq in July 2017 had been divided into two tranches of $75 million each. After Pence’s comments, USAID renegotiated its agreement with the U.N. so that the majority of the first payment, $55 million, would still go to the U.N. but would be earmarked for religious and ethnic minorities in Nineveh Province.

For new grants, which were separate from the U.N. funding, USAID hosted 33 organizations at a two-day March 2018 Baghdad workshop. They included large, established faith-based groups like Samaritan’s Purse and Catholic Relief Services, as well as smaller, little-known Iraqi organizations, according to a list of attendees obtained by ProPublica through a public records request.

The attendees included two Pence aides: Sarah Makin-Acciani and Steve Pinkos. Before joining Pence’s team, Makin-Acciani worked for Republican lawmakers, as a lobbyist for the U.S. Consumer Coalition and for the Trump campaign. Pinkos had worked for a lobbying firm, as an aide to Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy and in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Neither of them appear to have expertise in development or foreign aid issues. Neither Makin-Acciani nor Pinkos responded to messages requesting comment.

Their presence at the Baghdad meeting, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, unsettled participants, according to four people who attended the event or were briefed on it. White House officials rarely, if ever, are so deeply involved in agency grant-making.

People “assumed they were there for a political reason or to put pressure on the process,” said one participant.

After introductory remarks by then-U.S. ambassador to Iraq Doug Silliman, attendees split into smaller groups to discuss possible collaborations. Makin-Acciani and Pinkos mostly observed and asked questions, several people who attended the meeting said. But at one point, the pair objected to a programming idea, saying it would take too long and not be valuable, two people who witnessed the interaction said.

“They were looking for quick fixes,” said one of the people.

Back in Washington, Mark Green, the head of USAID, expressed discomfort to a colleague about potential interference by Pence into the grant process, one former U.S. official said.

Ultimately, later that spring, career officials made the final grant decisions and gave millions of dollars in funding to large, established organizations: Catholic Relief Services, Heartland Alliance and others. Awards were structured as umbrella grants that included sub-awards to small Iraqi organizations. USAID rejected some bids by smaller, untested groups with no prior experience with the agency.

“We still try to stick to our principles, that you gotta have a good proposal and you gotta have your qualifications there and so on, and they didn’t meet the standards,” a former USAID official said.

One rejected application was a bid by the Catholic University in Erbil and the Nineveh Reconstruction Committee, a coalition of three major Christian denominations in Iraq. Warda, head of the Chaldean Catholic archdiocese in Erbil, also heads the board of trustees at the university. (Chaldean Catholics, an Eastern Rite of the Roman Catholic Church, make up about two-thirds of Iraq’s Christians.)

Rasche, who is a vice chancellor at the Catholic University in Erbil, was formerly president of Nineveh Reconstruction Committee-USA, a now-defunct nonprofit formed to further NRC’s aims by winning U.S. government grants. Rasche said he and Warda were in Washington when their proposal was rejected and promptly told their “friends and partners” of their denial.

Before USAID had itself announced the awards, Fox News published a detailed account criticizing USAID’s activities in Iraq. “We are worse off now than we were two years ago,” Warda said to Fox.

Two days later, former Reagan administration national security adviser Robert McFarlane and New Jersey Republican Rep. Chris Smith co-authored an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal criticizing USAID’s decision to reject the two Christian organizations. They said it showed career USAID officials were ignoring Pence’s preferences. The title of the op-ed: “Iraqi Christians Are Still Waiting, Mr. Pence.”

Smith’s spokesman and McFarlane did not respond to interview requests.

On June 8, 2018, a day after the op-ed was published, Pence’s spokeswoman issued a terse statement, saying he “will not tolerate bureaucratic delays in implementing the Administration’s vision.” Pence also directed Green to travel to Iraq and report back on how to resolve delays.

That same day, Pence’s then-chief of staff, Nick Ayers, called Steiger to demand somebody at the agency be punished for the failure to provide aid to Christian groups quickly enough, according to several people familiar with the conversation. Ayers did not respond to requests for comment.

Green’s reaction was to remove Maria Longi, a career civil servant and a top official in USAID’s Middle East bureau. Though still on USAID’s payroll, she now teaches national security strategy at the National War College.

Longi’s dismissal and Pence’s displeasure with USAID had been reported by BuzzFeed and The Wall Street Journal, though the extent of Pence’s role in her reassignment had not been. Longi declined to answer questions.

The move reverberated among career officials, who traded text messages and emails expressing shock. USAID insiders coined a term for what had happened to her: Longi had been “Penced.”

Concern spread even among Trump appointees that their jobs might be threatened. “What it did instill in the Middle East bureau was fear among the political appointees that they could be thrown out at any time,” a former USAID official said.

Last month, USAID announced $4 million in new grants to six Iraqi organizations as part of an effort in Iraq and other countries to work with small, local groups that have done little prior work with the agency. Two of the winning groups were the Shlama Foundation, a small charity, and the Catholic University in Erbil.

Two USAID political appointees were involved in awarding those grants: Ferguson, the second-highest-ranking official in USAID’s Middle East bureau, and Samah Norquist, the agency’s adviser on religious pluralism in the Middle East and wife of conservative tax activist Grover Norquist.

Ferguson and Samah Norquist were included in the selection process for the newest grants, and one official said Ferguson oversaw the final determinations.

A former USAID official said Norquist was “really involved in the details” of the grants but seemed to have little awareness of standard USAID practice when meeting with grantees.

“She was swimming in the dark, and it was really quite clear that she didn’t know the first thing about grant-making,” such as what information was proper to share and how to ensure an open award process rather than one targeting specific groups, the former official said.

Norquist expressed support for Trump’s 2020 reelection at a State Department forum in July, a statement that experts said likely violated a law forbidding government officials from engaging in political activities on the job. The incident sparked complaints to an independent agency, which determined in October that Norquist’s comments did not violate the law.

A third political appointee at USAID, Max Primorac, the agency’s envoy in Erbil for minority assistance programs, tweeted praise for the Shlama Foundation months before USAID announced the final grant winners. The group replied with thanks, tagging Pence’s Twitter account. Shortly after the award announcement, Primorac met with a Shlama Foundation board member during a visit to Michigan.

Primorac is known among U.S. officials for his close working relationship with Pence’s office. Prior to joining USAID, Primorac served with Rasche at NRC-USA, as secretary and treasurer of the nonprofit. The two submitted an unsolicited $22.5 million bid to rehabilitate Christian towns to USAID in 2017, which was not awarded.

Asked if any Shlama Foundation officials were in touch with Primorac, Norquist or Ferguson prior to its award being announced, board member Ranna Abro declined to answer specifically.

“USAID was familiar with our organization as it is well-known by the local community in the Nineveh Plains,” she said. “We have met USAID several times along with all other organizations serving the same area.”

Rasche said Norquist ran a workshop in Erbil for organizations interested in applying for the new grants, which staff members of the Catholic University in Erbil attended. Rasche also spoke with Ferguson two to three times about the grant dates and funding cycles, he said.

Five current or former U.S. officials said involvement in grant decisions by political appointees — particularly by someone as senior as Ferguson — is highly unusual. USAID grants are typically decided by a review committee and a contracting officer, all of whom are career officials.

“USAID procurement rules with technical review panels are strict, as they should be, to avoid any political interference on the use of U.S. taxpayer dollars,” said Paige Alexander, a former senior USAID official who served during the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations.

Jhunjhunwala, the USAID spokeswoman, said the award process is rigorous “and follows all federal regulations.” Ferguson, Norquist and Primorac were not on the committees that made the recommendations, she said.

The new grants have “empowered local organizations to solve problems not adequately addressed by other USAID investments and that directly respond to the grassroots needs of conflict-affected communities,” she said.

Like the Catholic University in Erbil, the Shlama Foundation had previously applied and been rejected for the 2018 grants. Shlama had complained about the rejection via Twitter, and Abro confirmed the tweet referred to the same grant for which the Catholic University in Erbil was also rejected.

For the newest awards, a document seen by ProPublica shows that neither the Shlama Foundation nor the university were originally included in a list of leading applicants that circulated within USAID.

The Shlama Foundation will receive $1 million over two years for a project focusing on solar energy, a pittance in the overall U.S. foreign assistance budget. But the money is three times what the nonprofit has taken in from charitable donations since 2014, according to its website. It has never before received government grants, Abro said.

“The Shlama Foundation, USAID and our vendor partners are certainly experienced and capable of implementing this solar program for a greener future,” Abro said.

Aside from its small size and lack of federal grant experience, Shlama was an unconventional choice for another reason. Last year it received $10,000 in donations from the Clarion Project, a nonprofit organization which researchers at Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative said “advances anti-Muslim content through its web-based and video production platforms.”

A Shlama Foundation board member also appeared in Clarion’s 2017 documentary “Faithkeepers,” about the persecution of Christians in the Middle East. The film focuses on atrocities committed by Islamic State, but also depicts Islam overall as a religion that seeks to subjugate minorities. Zach Sicherman, an associate producer for the film, declined to respond to questions.

Clarion also did not respond to questions. It describes itself as a “non-profit organization that educates the public about the dangers of radical Islam and other extremist ideologies.”

Abro said that Shlama did not solicit the Clarion donation, and that it appeared in the documentary because “we value transparency and are open to participate in interviews from all sides.” The film’s website includes a donation page that benefits Shlama.

Foreign aid experts said USAID typically examines an organization’s major donors to protect the agency from perceptions that it is benefiting biased groups, but they disagreed over whether the link to Clarion should have disqualified Shlama for U.S. funding.

The Catholic University in Erbil’s new grant from USAID is its first direct agency award. The award, $700,000 over one year, will support courses for “widows, victims of abuse, and former captives of ISIS,” according to a USAID press release.

The newest grant “has come very late in the day, and our award is comparatively quite small,” Rasche said. He attributed the award not to Warda’s public statements but rather to the passage of the 2018 bill.

USAID’s inspector general is investigating some of the agency’s activities in Iraq, the watchdog said, though it is unclear what sparked the probe.

USAID is now expanding its emphasis on religious minorities far beyond Iraq. In December, a month after his email about White House pressure, Ferguson told USAID mission directors in the Middle East that agency leadership had identified up to $50 million it planned to use in 2019 for “urgent religious freedom and religious persecution challenges,” according to a second email seen by ProPublica. He asked mission directors to submit programming ideas.

In a follow-up email in June, also seen by ProPublica, Ferguson wrote that in addition to Iraq, religious and ethnic minority programming was planned for Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia.

Via ProPublica

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CNN: “Trump: US will prioritize Christian refugees”

If history matters, then getting right the history of the first encounters of the world’s two largest religions—Christianity and Islam—really matters. In this fascinating video, Prof. Michael Penn, the Teresa Hihn Moore Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University, sheds light on the extremely important but little-known aspects of the early history of Christian-Muslim encounters. Prof. Penn’s books referenced in the video: – When Christians First Met Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam – Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World (Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion)

Prof. Michael Penn, the Teresa Hihn Moore Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University, via Emir Stein Center: “When Christians First Met Muslims”

Script: If history matters, then getting right the history of the first encounters of the modern world’s two largest religions—Christianity and Islam— really matters. The problem is, we likely have that history wrong. The received story of Christian-Muslim interactions is a story of unrelenting military conflict beginning with Islamic expansion shortly after the birth of the new religion in seventh-century Arabia, and ending with the siege of Constantinople, with a few crusades thrown in the middle for good measure. Now there’s nothing factually inaccurate about this narrative.

The problem is simply that it’s only a small part of a much larger story. Let me explain… Early Christianity is primarily seen as a religion of the Mediterranean Basin that spread with the Roman Empire, and was recorded in Greek and Latin. But, a large number of early Christians lived in what would be modern day Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Eastern Turkey, while generally writing in a dialect of Aramaic called Syriac. Due to a series of fifth-century theological controversies, most western Christians considered these Syriac Christians heretics and essentially wrote them out of history. My own research focuses on how the history of Christianity changes if we no longer ignore that for centuries the geographic center of Christianity was not Rome or even Constantinople but rather Baghdad.

The recovery of this essentially lost history of Christianity profoundly affects our understanding of early Christian-Muslims relations. Again, let me explain… The prophet Muhammad was born around the year 570 in the city of Mecca. According to Islamic tradition, his prophecy began in 610, when he first received divine revelation; in 622, he fled to the city of Medina to escape persecution; there, he and his growing followers thrived, and, eight years later, he triumphantly led a Medinan army into Mecca, where he died in 632. His first successor, oversaw the beginning of a dramatic expansion often known as the Islamic Conquests. Muslim forces experienced unbelievable success in the following decades. In just a few years they took over the entire Persian empire and two thirds of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine empire.

They soon controlled all of North Africa, Spain, and were only repelled in France. In the eastern Mediterranean, military conflicts between the Islamic and Byzantine empire continued for over eight centuries, resolved only in 1453 when Islamic forces finally took the city of Constantinople, what is modern day Istanbul. However, this well-accepted narrative is overly simplified because there are only a handful of modern scholars who can read writings in Syriac from the majority of early Christians who lived under Muslim rule. The problem is if you stick to Greek and Latin sources, you are building your history of Christian reactions to Islam solely on the writings of Christians who were primarily in military conflict with Muslims.

But up to half of ancient Christians lived in the Middle East and had a very different experience with Muslims than did most Greek and Latin Christians, with any military encounters over in just a few years. By the 640s, they were firmly within the Islamic empire. How then would the history of Christian-Muslim relations change if, instead of reading Christians often at odds with Muslims, we focus on Syriac Christians who had daily interactions with Muslims and thus a much more direct knowledge of Islam.
I wrote two books exploring how in the Islamic Empire, these Christians held key government positions, attended the caliph’s court in Baghdad, collaborated with Muslim scholars to translate Greek knowledge into Arabic, accompanied Muslim leaders on their campaigns against the Byzantines, and helped fund monasteries through donations from Muslims—including money from the caliph himself. Middle Eastern Christians ate with Muslims, married Muslims, bequeathed estates to Muslim heirs, taught Muslim children, and were soldiers in Muslim armies. …
Follow us on social media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EmirSteinCenter Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmirSteinCenter Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emirsteince… Website: http://www.emir-stein.org

Some have argued that Christianity is declining in the Middle East, and this allegation is certainly true in some ways and in some places. If Egyptian Christians declined from 8 percent to 5 percent over the past century, that is a proportional decrease.

But the people who make these arguments are only looking at *proportions* in Egypt, ignoring the tremendous increase over time in the *absolute* number. Moreover, Christians are often disproportionately influential economically or culturally. They aren’t on the verge of disappearing, contrary to what the headlines often suggest.

I’m not starry-eyed and admittedly it is no fun to be a minority in most societies, and radical extremists such as ISIL have targeted them on occasion. The Iraqi community has been devastated, and the Christian villages in Eastern Syria where ISIL gained sway were depopulated. The Christians in Palestine and Israel are under just as much pressure from Israeli Apartheid as other Palestinians.

But the president and chief of staff of Lebanon are Christians. Christians have some power in al-Assad’s part of Syria. Those in Jordan seem fairly well protected by the state and are mostly prosperous. Egyptian Copts have faced some terrorism or just pogrom-like attacks on churches, but they are numerous and powerful in some occupations and some of them are part of the economic elite. Last year they opened an enormous new cathedral.

Let me try to gather the statistics as we now estimate them. The citizen population of Lebanon is about 4 million, and my educated guess is that Christians form about 22 percent. That would yield 880,000 Christian citizens. (Official statistics put them as high as 40%, or 1.6 million). Some of the Syrian and Iraqi refugees (over a million people) are Christian, and it may be they will find a way to stay and become naturalized, increasing the Christian population (this happened to Armenians decades ago). Beirut and Jounieh are places were you really feel Christmas in the Middle East:

MTV Lebanon: “Aishti By The Sea – Christmas Edition”

Egypt is the biggest Christian center in the Arab world, in absolute numbers. Pew estimates Egyptian Christians at 5%, but admits that they may be under-counted. In 1927, when the Egyptian population was about 14 million, there is one estimate that Christians were 8.3 percent of the population. That would have amounted to 1.2 million Christians at that time.

The likelihood is that Christians today in Egypt are about 5-6 percent of the population. But since Egypt’s population growth rate is one of the highest in the world, the country has grown to nearly 100 million. That number would indicate that Egyptian Christians are roughly 5 or 6 million strong, and that their numbers have increased 4 or 5 fold in the last century!

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Even at the low end of current estimates (Copts themselves insist that they are at least 10% of the population), Egyptian Christians if they were their own country would be the size of Norway or Finland. That demographic weight is nothing to sneeze at. Egypt’s Christians celebrate Christmas on January 7.

CGTN: “Coptic Christians in Egypt celebrate Christmas on the January 7 [2018]”

Jordan’s citizen population is around 6.8 million now, and Christians form about 4 percent. That would be about 272,000 Christians today, or over a quarter million. In 1952, Jordan’s population was 586,000, giving 23,000 or so Christians. Christians have thus grown by a factor of almost 10 in Jordan.

Syria may have been 25% Christian in 1920 when the population was 2.5 million. That would have been 625,000. But Christians have probably declined to about 11 percent of the population, in part because they are more likely to be urban and have smaller families than Sunni and Allawi farmers. Syria’s resident population today is 18 million, but roughly another 4 million are outside the country, mainly in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, for a total of 22 million. It is likely that the majority of this 4 million will return. Christians would be about 2.5 million. Even with all the refugees and disruption, it seems likely that Syria has about 2 million Christians left. The ones in the Damascus area, most of which the al-Assad regime retained, were relatively protected from the civil war. The number of Christians in Syria has in absolute terms almost quadrupled since the beginning of the French Mandate in 1920.

Iraq is 38 million or so. The Internets say that only about 250,000 Christians are left. Iraq is the one place where the absolute number of Christians actually has fallen. In the 1980s when Iraq’s population was 16 million, the percentage of Christians was thought to be 3 percent, for 480,000. So the number of Christians has been halved in absolute numbers in the past 38 years or so.

There are about 170,000 Christian citizens of Israel. There are roughly 40,000 Christians in the Israeli-Occupied Palestinian territories (Christians find it easier to emigrate to Europe and the US than Muslims, and the pressure on Palestinian Christians of the Israeli squatters makes life unpleasant). Anyway, that is on the order of 210,000 Christians under Israeli rule.

Middle East Eye: “Palestinians perform ‘dabke’ as the Christmas lights go up in Ramallah”

Iran has about 300,000 Christians.

So Copts and other Egyptian Christians, Jordanian Christians, Syrian Christians and Lebanese Christians come to something on the order of 9.2 million.

The Christians in the region if they were all together as one country would be Hungary or Sweden. They have billionaires among them and the Levantine ones are disproportionately likely to be middle class. They are a much smaller proportion of the region’s population than they once were, but they can’t be dismissed as a social and economic and cultural force, and their absolute numbers have soared over the past century.

Proportional decline and absolute dramatic increase is a concept hard to communicate in journalism.

There are substantial Christian populations on the fringes of the Greater Middle East– 12 million or so in South Sudan (and these have a significant diaspora in Egypt), 2.5 million in Eritrea, and 65 million in Ethiopia (alongside 41 mn. Muslims). There are also millions of Filipino and European Christian guest workers in the Gulf, and some Gulf countries like Qatar are moving toward granting permanent residency and have licensed churches, though citizenship is not on offer.

“A Muslim businessman in Iraq put up an 85-foot-tall Christmas tree in Baghdad to show solidarity with Iraqi Christians and help Iraqis “forget their anguish””

NewsBeat Social: ”
LOOK: Christmas Tree in Baghdad ‘Represents Love and Peace'”

Pew Research has released a report saying that

“As a whole, the region continued to have the highest levels of religious hostilities in the world. In 2014, the median level of religious hostilities in the Middle East and North Africa reached a level four times that of the global median.”

But is there another way to look at this data? Is it really all about religion?

Pew does excellent polling and I’ve used their work a great deal, e.g. in my Engaging the Muslim World . And the good thing about their polling is that they are very up front about their assumptions and methodology.

This is what they mean by “religion”:

“For the purposes of this study, religion-related terrorism includes acts carried out by subnational groups that use religion as a justification or motivation for their actions.”

So a “subnational” group might well be driven primarily by nationalism, but if its members commit terrorism that is “religion-related,” then it gets counted under the sign of religion.

Social scientists talk about people having “markers” of identity. Language and religion can be such markers, as can constructions like “race.”

In the context of Protestant Britain, Irish immigrants in the 18th century were coded as Catholics or “papists.” Where there were mob attacks on them, however, it would be difficult to prove that the fine points of theology were always the main drivers of the violence. Some of it was social class, some of it was “race.”

So it isn’t easy to disentangle religious motivations from nationalist ones.

Pew adds

“Religion-related terrorism also includes terrorist acts carried out by individuals or groups with a nonreligious identity that deliberately target religious groups or individuals, such as clergy. ”

So what Pew is really measuring is not religious fanaticism at all, but the prevalence of symbolic targets that are religious in nature.

So if two secular groups fought and a religious symbol was harmed, the incident in this study would be classified as religious violence.

In social science, you have wide latitude in making your definitions, as long as you clarify your terms to begin with.

What Pew is actually saying is that in the Middle East and North Africa, people are four times as likely to act out their ethnic violence by attacking religious symbols as in the rest of the world. It isn’t saying they are four times as likely to be religious fanatics.

My guess is that the Middle East is unusually religiously pluralistic, and this is especially true of the Levant to the Gulf. Whereas Poland is almost entirely Catholic, Iraq is 60 percent Shiite and 37 percent Sunni (counting Arabs and Kurds).

There are also relatively high rates of religious belief in the region. If you wanted to hurt a member of another ethnicity, you’d know that striking their religious edifices or clergy, etc., would hit them hard. Thus, al-Qaeda’s destruction of the Shiite Golden Dome shrine of the eleventh Imam in Samarra in 2006 set off an Iraqi civil war. You couldn’t hurt the feelings of very many French by taking a sledge hammer to a gargoyle.

A lot of the violence that gets coded in the US press as religious is actually about nationalism. This principle holds especially true in Palestine-Israel.

But take Syria. Some observers suggest that the Lebanese militia, Hizbullah, which is Shiite, intervened in Syria to help the Alawites, also Shiites. But they don’t belong to the same branch of Shiism. Most Lebanese Shiites belong to the orthodox Twelver school, with mosques, collective Friday prayers, clergymen, etc. Alawites are heterodox– lacking mosques and having wise men rather than seminary-trained clergymen. Most Sunni and Shiite Muslims don’t consider the Alawites to be Muslims. Moreover, many Syrian Alawites are members of the Baath Party, which is highly secular and socialist. So Hizbullah did not come into Syria for reasons of religious sympathy. They came in because the Baath, secular government of Syria is a vital supply route for Hizbullah.

So if a Sunni mosque was shelled by Baath Party members because even relatively secular Sunni opposition groups were hiding behind it, Pew would count that as religious violence in this study.

That outcome is legitimate, since they defined their terms to begin with. But as consumers of such studies, we should be careful about how we use the findings. They aren’t saying what we might at first assume they are. In polls as in consumer purchases, always read the fine print.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

U Chicago Social Sciences: “PANEL 2: Religious Minorities in Syria’s Civil War | Keith Watenpaugh”

“I express my deepest concerns after the destruction of the Monastery of St Elijah. It was the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq and an invaluable testimony to the rich cultural and religious diversity of the country. For 1,400 years the monastery stood as a place of worship and meditation, accepted by people of all faiths. Its destruction is yet another violent attack against the Iraqi people which confirms the crimes against humanity suffered by the Christian population, and the extent of the cultural cleansing underway in Iraq,” said UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova.

“Christianity was born in the Middle East, and is an integral part of the history of Iraq and the Iraqi People. Such deliberate destruction is a war crime and it must not stay unpunished. It also reminds us how terrified by history the extremists are, because understanding the past undermines the pretexts they use to justify these crimes and exposes them as expressions of pure hatred and ignorance. Despite their relentless crimes, extremists will never be able to erase history. The history of this region is known all over the world, and reminds us all that there is no ‘pure culture’. UNESCO remains committed to protecting the heritage of Iraq and leading the fight against the illicit traffic of cultural artefacts, which directly contributes to the financing of terrorism,” she added.

According to several sources and media reports, the monastery of Deir Mar Elia was destroyed in August 2014 and its destruction was only confirmed recently. The monastery is named for the Assyrian Christian monk — St. Elijah — who built it between 582 and 590 A.C. It was a holy site for Iraqi Christians for centuries, part of the Middle East Chaldean Catholic community, bearing witness to the religious diversity of the region, where people of all faiths have lived together for centuries. Iraq’s Christian population has dropped from 1.3 million in the early 2000s to 300,000 today.

Via UNESCO Media Services

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Luke Sheridan, Associate Press exclusive: Oldest Catholic Monastery In Iraq Is Razed