Iraqi Refugees Will Not Be Home for Christmas

Dawlat Elias spoke with dry eyes about the Muslims now squatting in her abandoned house in Kirkuk, Iraq, and of her grueling journey from the only home she ever knew. She is stoic about the idea that she’ll never see her country again.

“Everybody’s homeland is very dear to them, but as Christians, we can’t live in Iraq anymore,” she said calmly.

But every time she mentioned Christmas, her composure cracked and tears spilled down her leathery cheeks.

“You can’t imagine how happy I am to see the Christmas decorations here in Damascus,” she said, dabbing her eyes. “If we put a cross outside in Iraq, they’d shoot it until it fell. We couldn’t go to church for two years. That was oppression.”

Thousands of Iraqi Christians have straggled into Syria, and each new attack brings a fresh wave. The most conservative estimates put their number at well above 4,000. They have knitted themselves into makeshift communities, including Dawlat’s, an illegal slum on the outskirts of Damascus. Here, in slapped-together cinder-block homes on unpaved back streets, the refugees will celebrate their first Christmas in exile.

The dusty streets flashed with strings of twinkling lights the week before Christmas. Faint strains of “Jingle Bells” slipped from shops. But the mood was bittersweet in the sitting rooms and alleyways where Iraqi Christians have landed.

They are far from home, longing for their families and battling for jobs, visas and housing. They have escaped the death threats, church bombings and kidnappings that engulfed their homeland after the ouster of Saddam Hussein. But now the refugees are caught between the impulse to start a new life and the desire to stay near Iraq’s borders in the hope that calm might somehow prevail, and they might be able to go home.

This holiday season isn’t an easy one for the widowed Elias and her family. They live on meager savings in a cramped, rat- infested apartment. Her son can’t find a job. They can’t afford decorations or a tree, let alone presents. To get the medicine she needs for her heart, Elias wraps herself in layers of thin sweaters and makes her way to a charity clinic in the basement of a Greek Catholic convent.

“Here we have nothing, but at least we are free,” she said grimly. “They say Iraq is a Muslim state now.”

Iraqis like Elias are overrunning the clinic, which doles out free healthcare in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Damascus. “Every day, 10 new Iraqi families show up,” said Malake Arbas, the nun who directs the clinic. “They say they’re fleeing; they ask for used clothes and medicine.”

It may seem odd that Christians are abandoning U.S.- occupied Iraq to seek shelter in Syria, which is often the target of threats and condemnations from the West. The U.S. has charged that militants, weapons and money for the insurgency in Iraq travel across Syria’s borders. But secular Syria is widely acknowledged as one of the few bastions of tolerance for Christians in an increasingly polarized and tense Middle East.

“When I see an Iraqi Christian, I feel ashamed of what’s happening in Iraq,” said Bouthaina Shaaban, Syrian minister of expatriates. “This is the most dangerous thing happening in our region.”

This neighborhood on the margins of Damascus used to be a lush stretch of apricot and almond orchards, but now there’s not a tree to be seen; they were all knocked down to clear the way for the illegal construction. Thick streams of truck traffic stir up clouds of dust and smog. Men sell used clothes and blood oranges from pushcarts.

Through the afternoon clamor wandered three young Iraqis, hands stuffed into pockets and caps pulled low over their brows. At first they said they were Christmas shopping, but they didn’t have a single package. With a shrug, they said their family couldn’t even afford a plastic tree. They were just hanging around.

“I don’t feel at ease here,” said Oscar Elips, 18, who mostly stayed silent while the other two, his cousins, talked. “We’re strangers here. We don’t belong.”

“We’re safe, at least,” said Sargon William Slewa, 21. But Elips just set his jaw and stayed quiet.

The youngest boy, 14-year-old Naramsim Slewa, should be in the ninth grade by now, but he doesn’t have the documents he needs to go to school. He said he is learning to be a hairdresser instead.

“No work, no school,” Sargon Slewa said as he ticked off the worries on his finger. “It’s very difficult for us. Imagine: We came out here today just to fool ourselves that we’re celebrating Christmas.”

The Slewa family was living in Baghdad when Muslim men began to show up at their door with death threats. The family spent Easter huddled inside. The older Slewa found a construction job with a Western contractor, and the threats came quicker until, one afternoon, the men burst inside. Sargon Slewa and his brother escaped by climbing onto the roof, they said.

Finally, the older Slewa rented a truck, loaded it with his family and some cousins and drove off toward Syria. They left almost everything behind to live crammed into two bedrooms in Damascus. They survive on money sent by their father, who went ahead to Canada, and the cash earned by a brother who managed to find a job in a Syrian kebab house.

And they are waiting, like the other Iraqis here, to see what will happen to their home.

“I was tired in Iraq,” Sargon Slewa said. “But I’m tired here, too.”