Both ISIS and Iraqi Authorities Abuse Christians

Iraq’s Christians endure oppression on both sides of the ISIS battlefront.

According to Nineveh Provincial Council member Anwar Mata, “more than 120 thousand Christians [were] displaced from Mosul and Nineveh” after ISIS took control of Mosul. "[A]bout 20 thousand of them have migrated Iraq since last year.... The lack of interest of the federal government towards the displaced Christians pushed them to migrate outside the country ... the psychological and moral damage was greater than the loss of their money and property as a result of ISIS occupation of Mosul.”

Meanwhile, the loss of Christian property was conducted not only by “ISIS,” but also by local politicians in Iraq. Impostors and fraudulent groups, thanks to corrupt officials, have managed to acquire illegal possession of thousands of houses belonging to Christian families in Baghdad, who fled the city after the U.S-led ousting of Saddam Hussein uncorked a virulent jihad on them.

Mohammed al-Rubai, member of the city council of Baghdad, said that almost 70 percent of Christian houses in Baghdad have been expropriated illegally, and property titles were forged with the tampering of land registers carried out thanks to the connivance of dishonest bureaucrats. The NGO “Baghdad Beituna” has calculated that the violations of Christian properties carried out with the complicity of corrupt public officials were about seven thousand. Even members of the political and military apparatus have enjoyed the “legalized” theft of Christian properties.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Judith Friedman Rosen Fellow at the Middle East Forum

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Iraq Anti-Christianism

Raymond Ibrahim

Raymond Ibrahim, a specialist in Islamic history and doctrine, is the author of Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam (2022); Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (2018); Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013); and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). He has appeared on C-SPAN, Al-Jazeera, CNN, NPR, and PBS and has been published by the New York Times Syndicate, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Weekly Standard, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst. Formerly an Arabic linguist at the Library of Congress, Ibrahim guest lectures at universities, briefs governmental agencies, and testifies before Congress. He has been a visiting fellow/scholar at a variety of Institutes—from the Hoover Institution to the National Intelligence University—and is the Judith Friedman Rosen Fellow at the Middle East Forum and the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.