After leveling Iraq’s Tomb of Jonah, the Islamic State could destroy ‘anything in the Bible’
Jonah’s main appearance in the Old Testament is short, but none too sweet.
As recounted in the Book of Jonah, God asked Jonah to preach. Not thinking himself cut out for the evangelizing game, Jonah ran away to sea.
But then Yahweh sent a great storm. When Jonah’s shipmates found out he was running from the Man Upstairs, they regretfully threw him overboard. Rather than let Jonah drown, God sent a great fish (or a whale, depending on the translation) to swallow him and — yuck — vomit him on dry land. Once saved, Jonah did preach to the people — but then got angry with God when He spared the wicked.
The end.
But as reluctant a prophet as Jonah was, his purported tomb in Mosul, Iraq, is a holy site for Muslims – even though it’s not likely the final resting place of a man purported to live in a fish’s tummy for three days. Instead, wrote Columbia University Near Eastern history PhD student Christopher Jones, the tomb is a sacred place “to meditate on the questions raised by the story of Jonah: questions of justice, obedience, providence, fairness and divine mercy.”
Until this month, when it was destroyed by the Islamic State.
Iraqis inspect the wreckage of the grave of the Nebi Yunus, or the prophet Jonah, in Mosul, Iraq, on July 24, 2014. (EPA)
Agence France-Presse confirmed rumors of the tomb’s fate with an Iraqi official. The official said Islamic State forces closed the mosque and took an hour wiring it with explosive charges. Then:
Boom.
Jonah’s tomb “has been turned to dust,” the official said.
The Islamic State isn’t new to this. As it establishes a caliphate to spread its ultraconservative faith, it’s destroyed cultural artifacts including Sunni, Shia and Sufi sites, according to Newsweek, and replaced the crosses on Mosul’s Syrian Orthodox cathedral with black flags.
Why?
“It indicates they are going for total eradication not just of their enemies but even of the possibility of people living together under their rule,” Sam Hardy, a professor at the American University of Rome and author of the blog Conflict Antiquities, told The Washington Post in a phone interview.
“Sometimes the practitioners of a new religion feel compelled to recognize a place as sacred, and develop their own reasons to continue to venerate it,”Jones wrote. “Other times, they choose to demonstrate the superiority of their own religion over other belief systems by destroying their sacred spaces and building their own in their place.”
Left: the 55-metre-high Buddha statue in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, on Dec. 18, 1997. Right: After its destruction on March 26, 2001. (REUTERS/Muzammil Pasha, Sayed Salahuddin)
Of course, governments and religions have destroyed antiquities since, well, antiquity. Romans destroyed Jerusalem’s Second Temple not long after Christ. During the Crusades, Christians destroyed mosques. The Nazis destroyed degenerate art. And the Taliban destroyed theBamiyan Buddhas in 2001.
The problem: In Iraq, the Islamic State is advancing. If it’s willing to destroy anything other religions — even other Muslims — hold sacred, what’s next?
“Basically pretty much anything in the Bible,” Hardy said.
What can be done?
“If we didn’t intervene when they were killing people, it would be kind of grotesque to intervene over a building,” Hardy said.
Perhaps the Islamic State will stop on its own?
“You think tactically they’d avoid provoking enemies,” Hardy said, but Islamic State forces “seem happy to do that. Possibly they are doing stuff to get media attention.”
Mission accomplished.
In northern Iraq, gains by Islamic State threaten centuries-old Christian town
Hundreds of Christians are driven out of Mosul after being issued an ultimatum by Islamic State fighters to either convert to Islam pay a religious tax, or face the sword. (Reuters)
BAKHDIDA, Iraq — In the center of this hardscrabble Christian town there’s a 12th-century church where visitors can peer into an underground passageway that once allowed the faithful to hide from Muslim marauders.
The tunnels below have since crumbled, but the threat still looms on northern Iraq’s surrounding plains.
When advancing Islamic State militants launched mortar attacks in late June, nearly all of Bakhdida’s 50,000 residents fled overland to Irbil, the capital of the Iraqi region of Kurdistan, for protection. Were it not for Kurdish pesh merga forces that swept in to beat back the onslaught, this historic Christian enclave, known to locals as Qaraqosh, would be deserted.
In recent days, most people have come back to their homes. But dire water and fuel shortages, electrical blackouts and a lack of work are strangling returnees who must also grapple with the mental strain of living within firing range of al-Qaeda-inspired Sunni jihadists.
With Iraq at risk of fracturing along sectarian fault lines, local leaders fear the loss of one of the world’s oldest Christian communities and its heritage as more and more residents move to Kurdish cities and neighboring countries. On Friday, the exodus was accelerated when the Islamic Statedecreed that Christian holdouts in the city of Mosul must convert to Islam or pay a special tax — with death as a “last resort.’’
Five car bombs kill at least 26 people in mainly Shi'ite districts of Baghdad on Saturday. Sunni insurgents are within striking distance of Baghdad. (Reuters)
“Bags are packed; people are leaving for good because it’s almost impossible to live here right now,” said Louis Marcus Ayub, 54, a Syrian Catholic member of the Bakhdida city council. “If there is no political solution, we’re in danger of disappearing.”
Iraqi Christians have endured greater persecution since the 2003 U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. In the sectarian conflict that followed, a surge of harassment, church bombings and other deadly attacks caused the population to shrink from 1.5 million to about 400,000.
In 2008, a wave of violence targeted Christians living in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and an ancient hub of Christianity in the region. Without a militia of their own, thousands found safe haven in Bakhdida, about 19 miles to the southeast.
When Islamic State militants staged a lightning attack June 10 on Mosul and took over the city, fresh waves of Christians fled to Bakhdida; only this time, militants stayed on their heels. In less than 48 hours, a flurry of mortar rounds and stories of kidnapping and murder of their co-religionists in Syria combined to empty the town.
“They want to kill us,” said Martin Jameel, 25, a shopkeeper who had just come back from Ainkawa, a Christian suburb of Irbil full of displaced families, to check on his goods. “We have no oil, no weapons. We are not Muslims, so they think we are enemies.”
The Syrian Catholic Archbishop of Mosul, Yohannna Petros Mouche, was one of the few who stayed behind. He understood that many families had left “to lead dignified lives,” but he’s resolved not to go.
“If we all leave, it sends the message that there is nowhere safe for Christians to live in Iraq — and this worries me,” he said, gripping the pewter cross that hung heavy from his neck.
How ISIS is carving out a new country
“I’m not a vagabond. This is my home, and I will die here if necessary.”
The seminary he overseas in Bakhdida had already become a way station for 35 Christian families and clergy from Mosul. According to Father Amanoel Adel Kalloo, one of the displaced, the city’s Christian community has plunged from about 3,000 to between 200 to 300 since the Islamic State takeover.
On two trips back to the city to collect belongings, he saw that the homes of religious leaders had been ransacked and taken over by militants, he said.
Muslims renting property from Christians have been ordered to pay the Islamic State instead, and employers have been told to lay off all Christian workers. For the first time in 1,600 years, there is no Sunday Mass.
While lives have so far been spared, Kalloo said the early July disappearance of two women who ran an orphanage, along with three children under their care, has stoked anxieties. He believes the rebel group was behind the abduction, but no one has yet received any information on their condition or whereabouts.
In Bakhdida, residents are grateful to Kurdish forces that have established a security perimeter around the city, allowing some breathing room for people to return. The Kurds have since outfitted a local Christian “protection committee” with bulletproof vests and assault rifles to patrol the streets.
No hostilities have been exchanged in more than two weeks, but if Islamic State militants go on the offensive again, “we will defend them [the Christians] until the last drop of blood,” vowed Capt. Mohammad Kamal Nader, a pesh merga officer in charge of the security at the town’s main checkpoint. “It is our duty.”
For now, the overwhelming concern is water. Area taps have run dry since the Islamic State took Mosul and cut off the town’s Tigris River water supply amid 100-degree-plus temperatures.
All water now has to be trucked in from outside at great expense.
Adding to people’s woes are electricity blackouts for the better part of each day. The main hospital is short of doctors who have stopped coming from Mosul. And without funds to pay town employees, heaps of garbage are piling up along sidewalks that remain largely empty throughout the day.
Bashar Toma, a 50-year-old mason, was among those preparing to leave. Last month, a pair of Islamic State mortars crashed onto the roof of the six-bedroom home Toma had painstakingly built to accommodate his children.
He thanked God that no one was hurt. But the constant psychological stress of living less than three miles from an aggressive and well-armed rebel force — whose forward positions are visible from his roof — has become too much to bear for the lifelong resident.
In the morning, Toma would move his family to a cramped apartment in Irbil.
“It hurts my heart to leave,” he said, “but I fear it will only get worse here.”
What Jihadists are Doing in Syria and Iraq While Gaza Grabs the Headlines
By Ishaan Tharoor
An image grab taken from a propaganda video released on July 5, 2014, by al-Furqan Media allegedly shows the leader of the Islamic State jihadist group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a.k.a Caliph Ibrahim, adressing Muslim worshippers at a mosque in the militant-held northern Iraqi city of Mosul. (AFP PHOTO/HO/AL-FURQAN MEDIA)
The world is transfixed by the conflict in Gaza, as the death tolls of both Palestinians and Israelis killed in the fighting continue to rise. It has animated global public opinion and sparked protests in myriad far-flung cities.
But as the rockets and bombs fall, a deadlier war next door rolls on. The Syrian civil war has claimed 170,000 lives in three years; this past weekend's death toll in Syria was greater than what took place in Gaza. By some accounts, the past week may have been the deadliest in the conflict's grim history. Meanwhile, the extremist insurgents of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), have continued their ravages over a swath of territory stretching from eastern Syria to the environs of Baghdad, Iraq's capital; the spike in violence in Iraq has led to more than 5,500 civilian deaths in the first six months of this year.
Over the weekend, Islamic State militants battled forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over a gas field in central Syria. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, some 700 people have died in just two days of fighting, including employees working at the facility.
Hundreds of miles away in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, activists and observers report a ferocious campaign against religious minorities waged by the Islamic State, which earlier declared the establishment of a "caliphate" in the lands it controls. The jihadists, who espouse a puritanical, intolerant brand of Sunni Islam, have instituted strict sharia law. According to the Associated Press, the militants have even forced shopkeepers in Mosul to place veils over the mannequins in their storefront windows.
Their other activities are far less amusing. On Thursday, a UN official told the BBC that the Islamic State had issued a fatwa, ordering female circumcision for all girls and women between the ages of 11 and 46. But according to at least one journalist, who spoke with residents in Mosul, that report may be false.
Even then, the Islamic State has moved rapidly away from earlier proclamations encouraging coexistence. They ordered all Christians to either convert or leave towns and cities where the Islamic State holds sway by July 19. Otherwise, they would face execution. That edict triggered a sad exodus of Christian minorities in Iraq's embattled Nineveh plains, once the heartland for some of the world's most ancient Christian communities. The militants have defiled historic tombs, seized monasteries, kidnapped nuns and killed other minorities.
In total, more than 600,000 Iraqis were driven from their homes in June alone, a direct result of the Islamic State's dramatic advance through the country. (See the map below to get a sense of how Iraq's many upheavals have shaken its population since the 2003 U.S. invasion.)
Courtesy of the International Rescue Committee.
A report from Human Rights Watch published last week documentedrecent murders, abductions and attacks suffered by religious and ethnic minorities in and around Mosul:
Since capturing Mosul on June 10, 2014, the armed Sunni extremist group has seized at least 200 Turkmen, Shabaks, and Yazidis, killed at least 11 of them, and ordered all Christians to convert to Islam, pay “tribute” money, or leave Mosul by July 19.
On June 29, ISIS abducted two nuns and three Christian orphans, whom it held for 15 days. Around that same time, ISIS issued orders barring Yazidi and Christian employees, as well as ethnic Kurds, from returning to their government jobs in Mosul, two regional government officials and a priest told Human Rights Watch.
Virtually all Turkmen and Shabaks – tens of thousands of families – have fled their communities near Mosul as a result of ISIS raids, in which the fighters seize local men and pillage homes and places of worship, residents of those villages said. Mosul’s few remaining Christian families also have fled, local priests said.
On Sunday in Baghdad, the country's foremost Christian cleric, the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako, lamented in a special sermon the fate of his flock. "How in the 21st century could people be forced from their houses just because they are Christian, or Shi'ite or Sunni or Yazidi?" he asked. "Christian families have been expelled from their houses and their valuables were stolen and ...their houses and property expropriated in the name of the Islamic State."
He went on to make a chilling, grand historic proclamation: "This has never happened in Christian or Islamic history. Even Genghis Khan or Hulagu didn't do this," he said. Hulagu Khan was the Mongol warlord whose horde swept through Mosul en route to sacking Baghdad in 1258, a bloody slaughter that snuffed out the proud Abbasid caliphate that had flourished there since the 8th century. Baghdad would take hundreds of years to reemerge as a political center. Sako may be indulging in hyperbole, but he echoes the sense of fear and uncertainty now gripping the region.
In the face of these traumas, some construe the heated attention on casualties in Gaza to reflect a kind of anti-Israeli bias. That's a bit much: the thorny Israeli-Palestinian crisis is at the heart of regional geopolitics and polarizes the conversation in ways the upheavals further east just don't. No one, for example, is trying to make excuses for the loss of civilian life in Iraq or Syria. But many more should be aware of how alarming the situation has grown.
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