In a piece at the NY Post Kenneth Timmerman argues for the US to do more after ISIS to help Iraqi Christians. More than a year after ISIS was defeated many of the areas in Nineveh where Iraqi Christians had been forced to flee when ISIS attacked in 2014 still need support and security. “We need to be able to govern ourselves,” Yohanna Yosif Toma, legal advisor to the Hammurabi Human Rights Organization, an Iraqi group that provides both aid and political support to embattled Christians, was quoted in the piece. “We don’t need another province that is majority Muslims. We need local government, local police, in Christian cantons.”
Timmerman is the author of ISIS Begins: A Novel of the Iraq War.
The issue of Iraqi Christians and other minorities, especially Yazidis, gained more spotlight when Congress passed a bill to support minorities targeted by ISIS. In addition there has been renewed focus on the damage ISIS did to rural areas. However the Christian communities in Nineveh need real support to recover. A recent renovation of the Mar Behnam monastery is one symbolic effort. In Qaraqosh (Hamdaniyeh) some life is returning. But other villages such as Bartella face struggles. They have now been liberated for almost two years, since the fall of 2016.
