Mar 5, 2008 | 12:08 PM
Category:
News
On Tuesday nights during Lent, the church that I attend runs a forum called Who is my neighbor? This forum introduces us to groups who we might not generally think of as being our neighbor. This past Tuesday, we were lucky enough to have a guest speaker, an Iraqi Christian who is a political refugee in the United States. His personal story of fleeing the violence in Iraq is both heart-wrenching and humbling; his views on the situation in Iraq, and what he thinks should happen next were enlightening.
Before Fadi fled Iraq in the summer of 2006, he was preparing to take a job teaching at a university in Baghdad. He lived in an area of Baghdad that was very unstable, the Iraqi government and U.S. forces had very little control of his neighborhood. Fadi, who was also fluent in English, did contract work with American forces, as did many of his friends. They worked on U.S. bases as interpreters. Of course, in working with the Americans, Fadi and his friends were putting their lives in great danger and two of his friends paid the ultimate price for trying to help rebuild the country, they were murdered by insurgents. It was after his friends were killed that Fadi knew he was no longer safe in his native country and sought to flee to the U.S.
Life as a Christian in Iraq is also not a walk in the park. After the regime of Saddam fell, among the first groups to be targeted were Iraqi Christians because they were perceived to be a pro-American population. Many churches were bombed, and priests as well as lay Christians were routinely kidnapped and often times beheaded. The result of course has been a mass exodus of Christians from Iraq. Once there were as many as 2-3 million Christians living in Iraq, there are now roughly between 750,000 and a million living in Iraq. Fadi’s sister and mother survived the bombing of the church where the family worshipped.
Shortly after fleeing to Iraq, Fadi learned that because it was known he worked with Americans, and fled to the U.S., his family was also threatened and they were forced to flee to Syria, where they are to this day. It was humbling to know that here is a man who has been through so much and yet had the strength to tell his story to a bunch of strangers, unified in our Christian faith.
The majority of his presentation dealt with telling his personal story of attaining political asylum here in the United States (which he received last December), but he did spend a little time talking about the political situation, and many of the questions asked centered around the role of the U.S. in Iraq going forward. The answers he gave were very enlightening. He was critical of the United States for not understanding Iraqi culture and how Iraqi society works. He saved his most pointed criticism for the current Iraqi government. The stable, secular democracy that the U.S. hopes to establish in Iraq cannot exist while the current government is still in power. It is rife with religious extremists, both Sunni and Shia, all reasonable, educated, secular voices have been pushed aside, with most of them leaving the country. Asked whether he thought U.S. forces should withdraw from Iraq, he said yes they should leave………………..when they finish their jobs. Should the U.S. leave now, or within the next six months, Iraq would devolve into complete chaos and destruction. The solution he favors many would consider radical, but he claims it to be Iraq’s only hope for a stable, secular government. He strongly advocated that the current Iraqi government be scrapped altogether, and in its place put what is in essence, a dictator. A strong, secular leader who can provide better security and stability, help guarantee basic necessities such as food, water, electricity, and jobs. Then once the situation settles and the educated Iraqis start to return to their homeland, then the process of building a democracy can begin. It was a very thought-provoking assertion, and that along with his view that American forces should not withdraw anytime soon raised a lot of eyebrows among the more liberally inclined parishioners of my church. It was a very meaningful discussion and one that caused at least the person writing this blog to rethink some of what my ideas were pertaining to Iraq.
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