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The Last
Christians: Stories of Persecution,
Flight, Resilience in the Middle East
by
Andreas Knapp
“Christians: The Unlikely Refugees”
“Jonah sighs, “We have
lost everything. Even our history. After nearly two thousand years, we have been
uprooted. Can such an old tree ever be
transplanted?” He goes on to relate how
IS terrorists cut down and burned all the trees in his family’s garden in Mosul
– a symbolic act by those seeking the root-and-branch destruction of the
Christian population.
-Excerpt, The Last Christians, page 36
German native and priest Father Andreas
Knapp, 60, resides in the housing project of Grunau in Leipzig, Germany, which
is a temporary home to these Iraqi and Syrian Christians who have been forced
out of their own homeland.
My community, the
Little Brothers of Jesus, traces its origins back to this adventurer turned
desert monk. Four of us have shared a house
in a prefab housing project on the outskirts of Leipzig for the past ten years,
and every year we invite friends and members of our parish to our ceremony on
the first Sunday of Advent. When we were
searching for a theme for our social 2014 event, my fellow brother, Gianluca,
had a brilliant idea: “Charles de
Foucault (Left) spent six years living as a monk in Syria. I have a Syrian colleague who’s lived in
Leipzig for years and is a Christian. He
could tell us about the situation of Christians in Syria.” We liked the idea and Gabriel and his family
were duly invited.
As our little gathering gets under way,
we are astonished to see more faces in the room. Gabriel has interpreted our invitation very
freely and brought a number of refugees from Syria and Iraq along with him.
Father Andreas cares for these Christians,
counseling them on spiritual matters, as well as the trauma in their past and
the trauma of living in a foreign country.
He aids them in adapting to their new environments: from helping them fill out paper work to
teaching them how to adapt to a new culture. They are the immigrants, the
strangers in the strange country, seeking asylum wherever they can find
it.
Two years after the family’s forced
exodus from Mosul, Iraq Yousif with the help of Father Andreas (Right) is able to get a
legal and valid passport and plans to visit his father after the New Year of
2016; but his father dies and the plans for the trip of reunion are turned to a
trip of mourning. Father Andres pledges
to accompany Yousif from Germany to Mosul, Iraq and attend his father’s funeral
with him. 
With only a knapsack for his luggage, Father
Andres (Left) encounters people from the region of Iraq and Syria who are
Christ-loving Christians and have for over 2000 years claimed this homeland as
their birth.
Father Andreas Knapp detailed his journey
and personal experiences in the book The Last Christians Stories of Persecution,
Flight, and Resilience in the Middle East published in September of
2017 by Plough Publishing House with cover photograph by Louai
Beshara; and translation by Sharon Howe. 
These elderly, men, women, children and
babies for simply being Christian were and are persecuted in numerous ways:
-forced to pay
protection money in the disguise as special taxes. If they do not pay the money the individuals
are brutally murdered or have limbs cut off.
* From January to June of
2014 Christians were forced to pay protection money to the jihadists in the
amount of $15 million dollars per month.
-stripped of money,
property and possessions:
* Christian homes marked scarlet red, a
signal that the home was Christian and an invitation for extremists to loot and
destroy the home.
-rape and forced
prostitution of Christian girls and women
*Christian girls and women were raped for not
wearing a veil.
* One woman was raped and beaten repeatedly for
days by 12 men. These rapes can turn to
bestial abuse; one woman was so distraught about the abuse that she took rat
poison in hopes of a quick death but convulsed for hours before she died.
*The
IS warriors consider the “unbelieving” girls and women to be their own rewards
for being warriors. As a result, these
girls and women were raped repeatedly and some sold in slave sex trade market.
-bomb attacks and destruction of Christian businesses.
*On December 25, 2013, at least 26
Christians were killed and 38 Christians wounded in a car bomb attack in the
Christian marketplace of Baghdad’s Dora neighborhood.
* In 2008, Muslim
extremists kidnapped Bishop Pilos Faraj Rahho (Left) Their goal was to force the church to supply them with Christian suicide
bombers in exchange for Bishop Pilos Faraj Rahho’s life. His church exemplified Jesus’s teaching and
example of non-violence and he was murdered.
-kidnapping
*On
September 10, 2006 Syrian Orthodox Priest Abuna Paulos Iskandar (Right) of Yousif’s
family’s home church Mar Aphrem – was kidnapped by Muslim extremists, who
demanded that the church disown a speech given by Pope Benedict XVI in
Regensbur, Germany: “Show me just what
Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and
inhuman such as his command to spread the sword the faith he preached.” The relatives of Priest Iskandar disowned the
speech and paid the ransom. Priest
Iskandar’s legs and arms were cut off; he was disemboweled; and then beheaded.
*
The Christians were forced out of their homeland of Mosul only to be given a
welcome back but then again given a choice on July 18, 2014 by self appointed
caliph of the IS the Islamic State Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – convert to our form of Muslim or be killed
by the sword
*In
April of 2015, Mosul’s Cathedral Church of Saint Ephrem was looted by the
Islamic religious fighters and is now known as the “Mosque of the Majahideen.” This desecration from a church to a radical
mosque included the severing of the cross at the arms and the body covered by
the Islamic State flag and crest.
*On
June 3, 2007 Muslim extremists killed Abuna Reghild (also known as Father
Ragheed Aziz Ganni) and three deacons and blew up their corpses disintegrating
it into tiny shreds.
Father Andreas (Right) reveals in his book how
appalled and horrified he was of the atrocities these Christians endure but
more importantly he questions himself if he has done everything he can to be
aware of the atrocities that are happening.
I wonder whether I haven’t
been paying enough attention to the persecution of Iraqi Christians in the
news. Or do such stories simply vanish
too quickly from the radar of our Western media? The unfortunate law of habitation dictates
that when terror attacks are carried out with such brutal regularity, they
become too routine to mention – and I, like anyone else, am a consumer of
news. In that sense, the Mosul
Christians share the fate of victims in many of the world’s trouble spots. Who spares a thought for the murdered of El
Salvador, the gang wars in Congo, the torture victims in the prisons of many
dictatorships or the attacks still being carried out in Baghdad?
There is so much more in this book –
Father Andres (Below Left) talks about the misconceptions of Muslims and the danger in
grouping all Muslims as radical or extremists; he talks about the Armenian
Christian Genocide of 1915; but more importantly he asks two vital questions to
himself and to other Christians across the globe:
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