A sombre Christmas for Middle Eastern Christians

Baghdad: With Christmas falling this year a day after Prophet Mohammad’s (PBUH) birthday, the city of Baghdad is holding Christmas celebrations in a sign of brotherhood with Iraq’s hard-pressed Christian community.

Fireworks were to illuminate the Tigris river every night of the week and a 25-metre Christmas tree has been set up in Zawraa public park. In Zayuna camp, in the east of the city, children listened to Christmas carols on Wednesday and danced with Santa Claus to Iraqi songs.

But, though grateful, many Christians say the gesture comes too late to improve their lot in Iraq, their homeland for nearly 2,000 years, but where Daesh is making their future increasingly bleak.

“I saw some nice gestures from many people on Facebook and this made me happy, to be honest, that people are celebrating Christmas together with us in defiance of Daesh,” said Mariam, a 29-year-old schoolteacher in Baghdad, referring to Daesh.

“But is it real? I don’t think so,” she said.

“Christians who left Iraq don’t wish to return and some of them are even nagging us to leave, saying that even if we make it through this ordeal, the next one will be the end of it,” she added, asking to be identified only by her first name.

Daesh, which swept through a third of Iraq in 2014 in its drive to build a caliphate, has displaced more than 200,000 Christians from the northern region of Nineveh, the cradle of the eastern Assyrian church, according to Iraqi Christian MP Emad Yohana.

Iraq’s Christian population has dropped from 1.3 million people in the 1997 census to about 650,000 now, said lawmaker Yohana. Their number ought to have been around 2 million by now under normal circumstances, he said.

“Christmas is in our hearts religiously, but I am depressed because it is not the same socially,” said Saeed Jalal, 31.

In neighbouring Syria, as military vehicles rolled by, Syrian boys and girls gingerly decorate a large Christmas tree in the Christian town of Sadad, at the front lines with Daesh.

Most residents of the ancient Syriac Orthodox-majority town in central Syria have fled, and those remaining are reluctant to celebrate the holidays as fierce battles with Daesh rage nearby.

With the steady approach of Daesh, Yousuf, a retired 65-year-old man living alone in Sadad, sent his family away to a safer village.

“I haven’t put up a Christmas tree in my house for the past four years because the situation does not allow us to, and because I can’t find a place for joy in my home,” he says.

On December 10, regime armed forces lost control of Maheen, a village 18 kilometres from Sadad, to Daesh after holding it for only a few weeks.

Only days before Christmas, decorations in Sadad are sparse. Instead, the town’s streets are teeming with military vehicles and fighters, who now outnumber civilian residents.

Of the town’s nine churches — some of them ancient heritage sites — just three are still operational.

In the church of Tiwadoros, some 15 kilometres from the front lines with Daesh, families gather for a modest service.

A massive collage of some 60 pictures is plastered across one of the walls, with the title “The Martyrs of Sadad”.

“I will defy Daesh until the last moment. How could I leave the village while my son defends it, and me, on the front lines?” says Shams Abboud, 62.

The sermon that day includes a special prayer in the Syriac language for “our youth, who at this time of year used to be busy decorating a big tree in the middle of the village, but who are now busy protecting our front lines,” says priest Mtanyos Melhem Stouf.

And in the birthplace of Jesus, Palestine, Christian faithful from around the world descended on the biblical city of Bethlehem for Christmas Eve celebrations.

The mood in Bethlehem has been dampened by a three month-long wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence that shows no signs of relenting.

While the annual festivities in the city’s Manger Square were set to go on, other celebrations in the city were cancelled or toned down because of the violence.

Marching bands and scout troops played festive music as hundreds of people began crowding into Manger Square on Thursday, admiring the town’s Christmas tree.

Latin Patriarch Fouad Twal led a procession from his Jerusalem headquarters into Bethlehem, passing through Israel’s concrete separation barrier, which surrounds much of the town. The Israeli regime built the barrier a decade ago to stop a wave of suicide bombings. Palestinians view the structure as a land grab that has stifled Bethlehem’s economy.