Breaking Cover Page 19

  Mark’s goal was to airlift groups of Syrian and Iraqi Christians away from ISIS-controlled territory. It was a bold idea, a daunting task. But taking on enormous challenges is nothing new for Mark and Roma.

  Mark is a veteran risk taker. He came to the United States from Britain at the age of twenty-two, and after scaling one challenge after the other, he became the insanely successful producer of Survivor, The Voice, Shark Tank, and Celebrity Apprentice. Acknowledging that moving groups of Christians out of a war zone was no easy task, Mark said that he’d never stepped into any of his projects knowing with 100 percent certainty how it would all work out. But that never stopped him from moving forward when he had an instinct to do so.

  Given the logistical and security challenges involved in such an operation, the group needed someone extremely familiar with the region, someone who knew how to navigate the complexities of the Middle East. That’s where we came in.

  After speaking with Joseph, Mark asked him to manage the evacuation. He and Roma generously committed the funds to make this effort possible.

  Joseph was more than happy to forgo other job opportunities because this wasn’t a job to him—it was deeply personal. It was a matter of the heart. God was allowing Joseph to use his background and expertise to help other persecuted Christians find places of refuge, just as the church had done for him so many years ago.

  Eager to contribute in any way I could, I volunteered to help Joseph conceptualize the project and plot a way forward. It was not going to be easy. If ever there were a good time to find countries willing to take persecuted Christians, this was definitely not it.

  It was the summer of the great migration. ISIS had swept through Syria and was pushing east into Iraq. After taking Mosul in June 2014, they turned their attention to Christian villages southeast of the city. They began to threaten the residents of the Hamdaniyah district, which included Qaraqosh and other small villages, warning them that they would soon overrun the Christian-majority region. In an attempt to starve the inhabitants out, ISIS initiated a blockade of vital supplies by setting up checkpoints on the outskirts of the city. They cut off the flow of water, fuel, and electricity and threatened Muslim neighbors not to do business with the Christians.

  As time progressed, the Christians felt a building sense of fear and unease, wondering when their rations would run out. They watched ISIS destroy neighboring Yazidi towns and speculated when they also would be attacked. Meanwhile, the villagers survived on nonpotable water, which caused the spread of skin rashes and disease. Without fuel, cars and other transportation became useless, making it difficult for residents to obtain supplies, go to work, and function as they had before. They struggled to survive.

  Then on August 6, 2014, ISIS initiated a full-on assault and began shelling Qaraqosh. That day, a rocket killed two children and one adult in the community. After having held ISIS at bay for so long, the Peshmerga (Kurdish forces) commander assigned to Qaraqosh informed the town’s archbishop that Kurdish forces were abandoning their posts. They couldn’t (or wouldn’t) hold ISIS back any longer.

  That was the moment when church officials made a most painful decision. The church bells rang out, the agreed-upon signal indicating that ISIS was coming and it was time to leave. Those who had access to telephones spread the word quickly, and others went door-to-door to be sure everyone had gotten the message. Within the space of a few hours, the panicked residents had packed as many family members as they could into every working vehicle and fled toward the city of Erbil.

  Almost all of the Christians fled that evening, many with just the clothes on their backs, their identification documents, and a handful of prized possessions such as the family Bible. Against the protestations of family members, a few older residents stayed behind, mostly parents and grandparents in their eighties and nineties who couldn’t bear to leave their ancestral home. Many were never heard from again.

  Because so many people fled Qaraqosh and other small villages at the same time, the short trip to the Kurdistan region became a long, hot journey. The roads were so clogged that the one-hour drive took up to twelve hours. Many families had to complete the last few miles of the journey on foot because the Peshmerga closed the checkpoints and blocked vehicles from entering the city.

  Overnight, a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions was thrust unexpectedly on churches, NGOs, and Kurdish authorities. Erbil overflowed with people in need of basic provisions such as food, water, and toilet facilities. Many made their way to local churches to seek assistance. They claimed little patches of space on the ground, on sidewalks, and in abandoned buildings, as well as in and around church sanctuaries.

  In the midst of all the chaos, hundreds of displaced families huddled in the courtyard of Mar Elia Church in Ankawa, a northwestern suburb of Erbil.

  Like many of the people who flocked to his sanctuary that summer, Father Douglas al-Bazi understood what it meant to stare death in the face, to be tortured for one’s faith.

  In November 2006, when Father Douglas was serving as the vicar of a Chaldean Catholic church in Baghdad, he was kidnapped by members of a Shi’a militia. Held for nine days, he endured beatings and the stress associated with not knowing whether he would live through the experience. Father Douglas was well aware that most people did not survive kidnappings—even when their family or church members paid a ransom.

  After withholding water from him for four days, his captors placed a bottle of water in front of the parched priest and said, “Just say the shahada and it will all go away.” (The shahada is the Islamic confession of faith, which states, “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Messenger.”) Father Douglas refused.

  His persecutors continued to torture and taunt him. They broke his nose, knocked out his teeth with a hammer, and fractured his vertebrae. Father Douglas woke up each morning wondering whether that would be the day he died.

  Even though his captors threatened to cut his head off and replace it with a dog’s head, the symbol of an infidel, he refused to convert.

  Then, with a boldness that I cannot imagine, Father Douglas told the militants, “Go ahead and just kill me now, but at least tell my congregation I’m dead, so they don’t have to wonder.”

  Weirdly enough, in between the abuse meted out to him each evening, his captors would ask for his advice on personal matters, and even—at times—forgiveness for their actions.

  Much to his surprise, Father Douglas was eventually released after a ransom was paid. But that wasn’t the end of it. Father Douglas endured yet another kidnapping and release, as well as an attack on his church, where he was shot with an AK-47. In fact, the bullet is still lodged in his leg.

  Prior to the war, more than two thousand families belonged to the Baghdad-based parish, and by 2013, fewer than three hundred families were left.

  Having lost so much of the community he served in Baghdad, Father Douglas left the capital in July 2013, relocating to Erbil, where he was placed in charge of the Mar Elia Church.

  Now within the span of a couple of days (August 6 and 7, 2014), approximately two hundred thousand Christians from the Nineveh plains had fled to Erbil to escape the clutches of ISIS. Overnight, Father Douglas’s sanctuary and its dirt compound filled up with hundreds of traumatized men, women, and children. They were in shock and unable to process the enormity of what had just occurred, but Father Douglas understood. He tended to their physical needs, he tended to their spiritual needs, and he tended to their emotional needs. He provided leadership at the most critical time, when these people were raw, depressed, and extremely vulnerable.

  As time progressed and the IDPs (internally displaced persons) were unable to return to their homes, Father Douglas tried to give them hope. He didn’t speak of faith and redemption from an empty space, but from a place of knowing. He didn’t speak of forgiveness in theory, but after having repeatedly wrestled with the notion and having found the strength to express it to his tormentors. He didn’t speak of courage and endu
rance as popular Christian and humanistic concepts, but as principles that he had been able to manifest in the darkest of hours.

  God doesn’t thrust afflictions upon us, but when they occur, he uses them to make us stronger and more effective than before. God knows that we can minister in more real and authentic ways when we’ve been there . . . when we’ve struggled through similar situations. Because we can speak from firsthand experience, our words carry more power, our actions more meaning. That is why God does not require perfection. That is why wounded people serve so well as his hands and his feet. Ministry is giving others what you yourself needed and received.

  Father Douglas knew well the struggles of these persecuted Christians. He had personally experienced the worst kind of persecution, having stared death in the face time after time. But against all odds, he lived. God had preserved his life. Now it was clear why.

  When Joseph’s friend heard about the situation at Mar Elia, she reached out to Burnett, who in turn reached out to Joseph. Within a matter of days, the mission began to take shape. The problem was simple, yet complex. We had to find a way to get the displaced Christians out of Erbil and into a safe country. Of course, given the current immigration crisis, that was going to be easier said than done.

  Desperate people from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia had been pushing onto the shores of Europe, pouring over its borders from every direction, including the sea. The crisis hit a fever pitch in 2015, when more than a million migrants flooded into Europe. In comparison, only 280,000 people had crossed illegally into Europe in 2014.

  The human tidal wave of migration was the result of two separate factors. The first was a significant psychological shift in which victims of the conflict realized they could not go back to their homes or continue to live in such desperate circumstances. They had slowly come to appreciate the intractable nature of the conflicts. Desperate Syrian families had prayed that the war would subside. That didn’t happen. Iraqis who fled the clutches of ISIS when terrorists took over Mosul and the Nineveh plains had held out hope that the international community would push ISIS back out of the villages or out of Iraq. But that didn’t happen either.

  The status of both conflicts had not changed, and nothing on the horizon suggested that they were anywhere closer to resolution. Refugees and IDPs became less and less hopeful that they would be able to return to their homes or resume their former lives. With heavy hearts, they began to search for a brighter future elsewhere.

  The second major factor responsible for pushing a million people into Europe was the increased presence and activity of people smugglers. These heartless and greedy “fixers” became quite proficient at funneling desperate refugees onto the continent from North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

  Unfortunately, affected countries had not considered solutions for stemming the illegal flow before refugees arrived on the shores of a woefully unprepared Europe. The human smuggling pipelines required the kind of strategic response we tend to reserve for national security and terrorism issues.

  Fortunately, Joseph and I had experience in both—not that that made our work any easier. In addition to the fact that countries around the world were overwhelmed with asylum seekers, finding countries willing to take Christians posed a significant bureaucratic challenge as well.

  Most countries’ immigration policies are tied to the process set forth by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). We, however, would not be working through the UNHCR or utilizing that process for several reasons.

  The first was due to the timing. The UNHCR process takes many years to accomplish. After UNHCR registers and prioritizes refugee applicants, receiving countries have to complete their own internal administrative processes and vetting procedures. Waiting five years for resettlement is not unusual, if candidates are resettled at all. In fact, only a small percentage of refugees and asylum seekers are resettled globally. For example, in 2014 alone, 866,000 asylum applications were submitted to the UNHCR.[10] Out of those, 103,890 were submitted by the UNHCR to potential receiving countries, resulting in the resettlement of a total of 73,331 individuals.[11] That’s less than 10 percent.

  Second, the UNHCR process does not service IDPs. In order to seek resettlement in a new country through UNHCR, people must first leave their country of origin and become refugees instead of IDPs. This puts IDPs in a tough spot because many of them live in camps within their own country but are just as desperate as those classified as refugees.

  The other significant reason that we did not want to utilize the UNHCR process was because most Christians do not seek refuge in UNHCR camps. Far from being filled with only innocent victims, many camps are a microcosm of the conflicts from which they emerge. Some unwittingly house former fighters, insurgents, and even members of terrorist groups, who carry out anti-Christian activities and other crimes in the camps. Because of this underreported and incredibly harsh reality, Christians, Yazidis, and other non-Muslim minorities mostly choose not to go through the UNHCR process to avoid facing the same persecution from which they just fled.

  Opting to go around the UNHCR process meant that the responsibility fell solely on us, not only to find a country willing to accept the Mar Elia refugees, but to provide solid assurance to those countries that none of the refugees we evacuated were in fact ISIS members or insurgents perpetrating a ruse to gain access to their countries.

  It was a formidable undertaking, but given that we had spent the past fifteen years determining the authenticity of sources in terrorist-ridden countries, we had the perfect backgrounds for it. Simply put, it was a mission Joseph and I had been preparing for our entire lives.

  [8] Angelina E. Theodorou, “Which Countries Still Outlaw Apostasy and Blasphemy?” Pew Research Center, July 29, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/29/which-countries-still-outlaw-apostasy-and-blasphemy/.

  [9] Max Fisher, “Majorities of Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan Support the Death Penalty for Leaving Islam,” May 1, 2013, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/01/64-percent-of-muslims-in-egypt-and-pakistan-support-the-death-penalty-for-leaving-islam/.

  [10] “UNHCR Asylum Trends 2014,” UNHCR, March 26, 2015, http://www.unhcr.org/551128679.pdf.

  [11] “UNHCR Global Resettlement Statistical Report 2014,” UNHCR, http://www.unhcr.org/52693bd09.pdf.

  Our first task was to find a host nation that would be willing to accept the asylum seekers from Mar Elia. Of course, given the current political climate, ours wasn’t the most popular cause to bring before world leaders. We knew the odds were against us.

  Because we were intimately aware of their immigration policies, we immediately crossed off several potential countries, including the United States. This was hard to accept—especially because we were keenly aware that there were many Americans who were more than willing to open their doors, their hearts, and their wallets to help this group. It’s not as though we would be asking the US government to give the Iraqis special treatment or to add more people to the welfare rolls. However, we knew that our government clung to the falsity that Christians in the Middle East were honored as “People of the Book” (as they are referred to in the Qur’an). Therefore, the administration reasoned that Christians could not be experiencing difficulty, persecution, or genocide.[12] As much as it broke our hearts, we removed the United States from the list and continued to look elsewhere.

  Then on August 19, as Joseph and I were sitting in the kitchen having coffee and reading the paper, Joseph stumbled across an article in the Washington Post that said Slovakia was willing to take in two hundred Syrian refugees, but . . . they had to be Christian.[13]

  It was a sign from God.

  “That’s where we need to go,” Joseph exclaimed. “Slovakia!”

  After skimming the article over his shoulder, I sat down across from him. “Yes! That’s exactly what we need to do! Now who do we know in Slovakia?”

  Crickets chirped in the background as we sa
t in silence, both of us aware that we had absolutely no contacts or experience there. We quietly sipped our coffee and pondered which of our acquaintances might have a contact in this tiny Eastern European country. A few minutes later, it hit me.

  “I know! Aron—Aron Shaviv—he’s done some senior-level consulting work in Slovakia, right?”

  “Yes, Aron!” Joseph beamed. “That’s right. I think he does have some good contacts there.”

  “Can you call him? E-mail him? See if he can help?” I was on a roll. “We need to get in at a very senior level, like the president, prime minister, or minister of interior.”

  Within fifteen minutes, Joseph had reached Aron, who confirmed that he did, in fact, have good connections in Slovakia and could probably help us out. As anticipated, Aron was a godsend and exactly what we needed in that very moment. But this was just the first step. We still had so much work to do to move the initiative forward.

  Because we had so much experience with government bureaucracies, we knew that the decision to work outside the UNHCR process would require a top-down approach. We needed to make our plea to the most senior government officials we could get in front of. Furthermore, we’d need to help them figure out how to organize such a project and how to work their own bureaucracies—provided they were amenable to our cause.

  Joseph and I knew that getting the Slovakian officials to reach such a decision would not be easy or quick. Political leadership would need to obtain the support of their security and intelligence agencies. We knew firsthand how slow and burdensome the coordination process was when multiple government agencies were involved in a task. But if we could prove, in the very beginning, that we were trustworthy and capable of ensuring that none of the people we were helping were members of insurgent or terrorist groups, then this would significantly speed up the logistics and cut down on any potential intragovernment political squabbling.