Assyrian Democratic Organization ADO
By Sabrina Tavernise
KARA-ULA(Iraq)- New York Times — The 70 houses of this tiny village spring from the treeless, arid plain here in the northern tip of Iraq with the uniformity of an army camp. Built over the past four years of war, they house Christian refugees from some of Baghdad’s most dangerous neighborhoods: Dora, New Baghdad and Mashtel.
There the residents did not know one another, busy with their city lives. Now a barber, a bank manager, a news anchor and an electrician are comrades in the misery of flight. “We saw everything a human can see,” said Majida Hamo, a mother of four who came from Mashtel recently. “It was a kind of genocide killing.” “We were saying to Jesus, ‘See us and save us.’ ”
The Iraqi exodus is one of the largest displacements in the Middle East since the creation of Israel in 1948. Many have fled to Jordan and Syria, countries where Arabic is spoken. Others have stayed within Iraq’s borders, moving into the largely peaceful Kurdish north, which is more foreign to them than neighboring countries because the main language is Kurdish, not their native Arabic. The choice of this small patch of land along the Turkish border was not arbitrary.
On a gray day in 1975, the refugees’ parents were driven from their farms here, caught in one of Saddam Hussein’s cruel sectarian relocation plans, residents said. They were given a few hours to gather their possessions and get into army trucks. They ended up in Baghdad. In the capital, the families — farmers and shepherds — became city dwellers, taking jobs as taxi drivers, maids and barbers. Samir Bibadro was born the year his parents arrived. They settled in Dora, a bustling lower-middle-class area with a large Christian population.
For most of his adult life Mr. Bibadro worked as a barber, giving trims and close shaves in his southern Baghdad neighborhood. After the American invasion, Sunni militants moved in to control it and began killing barbers, because the Prophet Muhammad wore a beard. Mr. Bibadro did not have the money to move to America, as some in the Christian community had, and settled for the village of his father, a place he had never been. Plans to move became urgent after the killing of his cousin and his brother-in-law. Sitting on a couch in his one-story concrete house far from the violence, Mr. Bibadro patted his chest with thick fingers and described his feelings with a smile and one word: comfortable. Upper-middle-class refugees have a different view.
For Suhail Nissan, a former bank manager, living in Kara-Ula feels like running out of air. She and her four children fled a year ago, after an anonymous caller threatened to kill her if she did not give up her house. She left without taking her furniture. Now, she is spending her meager savings busing her children to an Arabic school. The teaching is far short of the standards in the schools for the gifted that her children attended in Baghdad, where they learned French and English, and she worries that their future is dimmer. Her savings will last just a few months more, she said.
“I am thinking, in two months what will I do?” she said, standing outside the new village church, clenching her hands nervously. She has even tried getting her old job back, as a manager at the Rafidain Bank in Baghdad, but it refused. The only instruction in the village for teenagers is a religious lesson taught by a former news anchor, Salam Toma, in a white room, empty except for rows of plastic chairs. Another problem is health care. As bad as the hospitals have become in Baghdad, care, at least for those with money, is still better than it would be here. Ms. Nissan’s husband went to Syria for care when he fell ill recently.
Behjat Tahkia, 43, an electrician, said his brother had wanted to move to the village with the rest of the family but had to stay in Baghdad because of a heart ailment. Still, people here are glad to be alive, and grateful to the local Kurdish government, which has allotted small monthly stipends and the land for their houses, residents said. Hermes Toma Musa was 32 when Mr. Hussein’s soldiers forced him to leave his patches of eggplant and watermelon, his goats and sheep.
For him, the return in 2004 was a homecoming. The concrete house is much better than the hut he lived in 40 years before. He has planted rows of apricot trees. The only building left from the past is an old police station, which is now a school. “Even if Baghdad were not on fire, we would still come here,” he said, standing in the sun on his roof. “It is like being in heaven while I’m still alive.”
By Sabrina Tavernise
New York Times
