By Robert Nicholson, The Philos Project.
I met Ban and her children on a Friday night deep inside the sprawling brown metropolis of Amman. It was quiet as we picked our way through the stone alley beside her building, descending a narrow flight of stairs to her apartment that overlooked a glittering green mosque.
Ban had been living here for less than a year – a refugee ever since her husband had been kidnapped by ISIS.
Her husband had been a cab driver, and that morning he had left their house just as he always did. When he didn’t return home by sundown, Ban knew something was wrong. She received a phone call: “Pay us $100,000 or we’ll kill your husband.” Her husband, also a Christian, had been targeted as an easy victim because of his faith.
She couldn’t pay of course. And never saw him again.
Her children asked: Where’s daddy? But ISIS was getting more powerful and there was no time to grieve. She gathered up her kids and escaped to Jordan.
Ban is a strong woman, but broken. Her small apartment seemed to shrink even smaller as she sobbed through her story, gesturing for friends to keep her kids in the side bedroom during our visit. God, she told us, was her only source of comfort now. My eyes welled up with tears when I saw the faces of her fatherless children poking around the doorjamb. They were near in age to my own.
Ban’s relief workers do their best to steer her thoughts away from the future. “Take it one day at a time,” they say, brushing over the fact that her situation, like thousands of other Christians across the region, is hopeless. Most of them can’t work in their country of refuge. Only a tiny fraction ever make it to the West. Some move back to Iraq in desperation, throwing themselves back into the cauldron for the sake of a paycheck.
Ban wasn’t the only Iraqi Christian I met in Jordan, but she was representative: traumatized, despondent, and bereft of any hope for a normal life.
I left discouraged. It was clear that these refugees needed immediate assistance, but what about the future? Where would they go? How would they survive when the donations ran out? And how could they possibly preserve their ancient way of life in the atomized and unstable landscape of a post-ISIS Middle East?
I asked lots of people, but nobody answered. At some point I realized, They don’t know. They don’t have a plan.
It wasn’t their fault, but it was the reality. And that, to me, was most troubling of all.
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As Christians, we need to be prepared to stand up for our faith. The early Christians had to do this.
Mr. Nicholson – What sort of “plan” do you expect the PCUSA to have in the face of this grave evil? Our theologians have difficulty identifying anything as “evil” or “terrorism” or “genocide” out of fear of violating someone’s idea of being politically correct. The PCUSA now has adopted a policy which views Israel as the problem in the Middle East and a posture of pacifism in the face of rampant terrorism. So to expect such individuals to have a coherent plan is to be unrealistic but tragic.