Thanks to President Donald Trump’s insane decision last week to allow the Turks to overrun northern Syria, my Facebook page is starting to fill up with photos of Kurdish “martyrs” and tearful notes in Arabic. The most prominent is Hevrin Khalaf, a female politician somewhere in her 30s, her dark hair pulled back, a half-smile on her face, framed by the dark, expressive eyebrows I’ve seen on so many Kurds.
The Turks blocked her car, pulled her out and executed Khalaf and her driver. I’ve attached a photo of her to this post. Reports indicate that Khalaf was raped and then stoned to death.
Things are changing pretty quickly on the ground. As of Sunday night, here’s what the New York Times said was going on, namely that the Kurds asked the Syrian government (with the Russians) to intervene.
Some of the biggest protesters of Trump’s decision have been evangelical Christian leaders, who are telling Trump that he’s basically sanctioned genocide of an entire people, while threatening the safety of other religious minorities in that region, including Christians in churches ancient and modern. I wrote about this possibility in August.
Trump had held off on allowing Turkey access to the region before but every time he gets on the phone with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he is bewitched into granting whatever Erdogan wants. Sadly, in his three years in office, Trump has basically given away every valuable American asset to everyone from the Chinese to the Turks, while avoiding any insistence that these nations toe the line on religious freedom.
Anyway, there is one huge point that reporters are missing when it comes to explaining why evangelical Christians care so deeply about northern Iraq. It goes way beyond the historic Assyrian Christian communities being allowed to function there.
Which is: The Kurds are the most open people group in the Middle East to Christianity and a number of these now-former Muslims are newly minted evangelicals.
Christianity Today is closest to pointing out this truth.
Christian voices are also keen to preserve the unique peace achieved between Kurds, Arabs, and Christians. Since 2014 a social charter has ensured democratic governance, women’s rights, and freedom of worship.
The town of Kobani, on the Turkish border, hosts a Brethren church composed of converts from Islam. Around 20 families worship there, and the church’s pastor, Zani Bakr, arrived last year from Afrin, displaced by an earlier Turkish incursion.
There were a bunch of news stories back in February about this new church. I’ve been aware of various foreign missionaries entering Kurdish Iraq for years, hoping to capitalize on Kurds’ disenchantment with their Arab Muslim brethren, especially during the years when Saddam was trying to kill as many Kurds as he could. In recent years, with ISIS terrorizing the region, enough missionaries have gone over there to the point that the Yazidis were complaining about them, according to Voice of America.
I got to know this part of the world while as a sponsor –- of sorts –- for a Kurdish family in northern Virginia starting in 1997, when about 6,000 of them got removed from northern Iraq and resettled in the States. Not only did my Kurdish contacts despise the Turks; they also hated the Arabs to the south in Baghdad. I got a huge dose of all this during my 2004 visit to Iraqi and Turkish Kurdistan.
“Only the mountains are our friends,” the Kurds would tell me. And remember, the Kurds do not consider themselves Arabs. Their language (I took a year of it) is closer to Persian. And so not a few have taken a second look at Christianity as an alternative to the Islamic faith their persecutors follow.
Which is why a place like the Classical School of the Medes can flourish there. (It is a private, Christian, English-based network of schools in Kurdish Iraq).
This Syrian publication (although it seems to be out of Lebanon) reported in June on Kurds becoming evangelicals.
People celebrated converts to Christianity with hymns and religious rites in the Kurdish language at the al-Akhwa Church in the northern Aleppo countryside. The celebration was permeated with hymns sung by a choral team in the church in an occasion described by the pastor, Zani Bakr, as “excellent” after masses and church bells stopped 30 years ago. Bakr, who is from Afrin, told Daraj that, “those who changed their religion were Armenians and Kurdish Muslims who converted to the Protestant Evangelical church.”…
New Christians performed religious rites on Palm Sunday and commemorated the anniversary of the Armenian genocide on Apr. 28, 2019 after the old churches had been closed for decades because of an absence of Christians in the city.
This phenomenon has become popular in Kobani, which has more than 460,000 residents. Marouf Ismail, a Muslim expatriate from Kobani, told Daraj that this phenomenon came in reaction to extremist Islamist factions invading Kurdish areas, first in Sari Kani (Ras al-Ayn) and then Kobani (Ayn al-Arab), who killed and terrorized residents, and spilled Kurdish blood of various religions and described them as infidels and atheists even though the number of Kurds who were Muslim was more than 90 percent — in addition to the spread of poverty and unemployment and war and political Islam and profiting based on religion.
So there you have it. Kurds who have turned to alternatives.
The Kurdish journalist Mustafa Abadi told Daraj that he noted the activity of Christian missionaries during the war on Kobani in 2014, saying that the Christian history in the city, “came with the arrival of Christian missionaries who started working the camps and villages on the Turkish border, inhabited by those fleeing the hell of war, after the fighting with ISIS scattered them five years ago.”
In the English-speaking world, the religious press is basically covering this story. CruxNow has this story of a Kurdish refugee in Europe who return to northern Iraq to evangelize his friends. This story (dated 2015) from the Gospel Herald tells of conversions among Kurds who were sickened by what they saw with ISIS.
Fox News reported on this phenomenon earlier this year.
Almost five years after ISIS slaughtered its way onto the scene in Iraq and Syria – brandishing their own extreme and much-denounced version of Islam – some in the Middle East are coming out to announce their conversion to Christianity, seeking another Abrahamic faith to drown out the nightmares of life under the terrorist tirade.
The report ended thus:
According to Alex McFarland, a U.S-based apologist and noted church speaker, conversions to Christianity are far more prevalent in the Middle East than Westerners realize “and the unconscionable actions of ISIS have prompted (that).”
“Interestingly, some ex-Muslims merely become atheists,” he added. “They don’t really land anywhere else, such as another faith system. They just become secular.”
For those who do want to consider another faith, Christianity seems to be the choice — although here’s a report showing that some are turning to Zoroastrianism.
Christianity in this part of the world is a mixture. There’s all those Assyrian Catholics who fled from Iraq, then have returned. They don’t necessarily get along with the Kurds. These folks aren’t in danger from the Turks at this point.
Then there’s a nascent Kurdish Christianity that has sprouted in northeastern Syria that is evangelical Protestant. That’s what those American evangelicals don’t wish to see disappear under Turkish guns.
Leaving Islam is considered apostasy and punishable by death. Thus, it’s understandable that not too many Muslim converts to Christianity wish to be interviewed or identified. That said, the spread of evangelicalism among the Kurds is a definite story and somewhere, somehow, I hope someone can report on it.