Convert, pay or die. Five years ago, that was the "choice" the Islamic State (ISIS) gave to Christians in Mosul, then Iraq's third-largest city: either embrace Islam, submit to a religious tax or face the sword. ISIS then
marked Christian houses with the Arabic letter ن (N), the first letter of the Arabic word "Nasrani" ("Nazarene," or "Christian") . Christians could often take no more than the clothes on their back and flee a city that had been home to Christians for
1,700 years.
Two years ago, ISIS was defeated in Mosul and its Caliphate crushed. The extremists, however, had succeeded in "cleansing" the Christians. Before the rise of ISIS, there were
more than 15,000 Christians there. In July 2019, the Catholic charity, Aid to the Church in Need,
disclosed that only about 40 Christians have come back. Not long ago, Mosul had "
Christmas celebrations without Christians".
This cultural genocide, thanks to the indifference of Europeans and many Western Christians more worried about not appearing "Islamophobic" than defending their own brothers, sadly worked. Father Ragheed Ganni, for instance, a Catholic priest from Mosul, had just finished celebrating mass in his church when Islamists killed him. In one of his last letters, Ganni
wrote: "We are on the verge of collapse". That was in 2007 -- almost ten years
before ISIS eradicated the Christians of Mosul. "Has the world 'looked the other way' while Christians are killed?" the
Washington Post asked. Definitely.
Traces of a lost Jewish past have also
resurfaced in Mosul, where a Jewish community had also lived for thousands of years. Now, 2,000 years later, both Judaism and Christianity have effectively been annihilated there. That life is over. The newspaper
La Vie collected the testimony of a Christian, Yousef (the name has been changed), who fled in the night of August 6, 2014, just before ISIS arrived. "It was a real exodus", Yousef
said.
