In the chaos as northeast Syria awaits the resumption of the Turkish invasion, Jayson Casper reports in Christianity Today that although many Christians are leaving, some brave souls are staying behind to help the families that cannot leave. Casper writes:
... after three days of Turkish bombing, the Alliance Church of Qamishli met to make a decision. Would they flee for safety, or remain and help?
To some degree they had no choice.
Fadi Habsouna, a father of two, was injured when missiles hit his home and ruined his shop. His wife is in critical condition. His grandfather’s home was destroyed by a bomb. The pastor housed them in church-owned property, and decided to remain to assist the family, and others suffering similarly.
The church agreed; only eight families would leave.
The city of Qamishli (2004 population 184,000) is one of the ten largest in Syria. It’s ethnically mixed, predominantly Arabs and Kurds with significant minorities of Assyrians and Armenians. The city was founded in the 1920s by refugees from the Assyrian genocide that was carried out by the Turkish government of the time — this was a mass killing (estimated 150,000–300,000 killed) that was smaller than the contemporaneous Armenian genocide. The city was about 20% Christian in 2004.
Roj Eli Zalla writes in the Kurdish news service Rudaw that the first Turkish shells to fall on Qamishli fell on Fadi Habsouna’s house. Zalla quotes Hanna Sawmi, a prominent Christian in Qamishli, as saying:
The Christian countryside and villages have all been deserted. Erdoğan has left nothing. He has hit water, electricity, civilians. There is not even a breath of life left. Even the air we breathe in is gun powder.
Casper reports something similar in his interview of Edward Clancy, director of outreach for the Catholic group Aid to the Church in Need USA, writing:
There are roughly 30–35 Christian villages in Kurdish-held areas, he said, but many are practically ghost towns.
Although some refugees have fled to Iraq, more seem to be fleeing further south into Syria, such as to Raqqa, the former capital of ISIS’s caliphate. Refugee agencies normally do not ask about religion, so there are no reliable figures about what percentages of these refugees are Christian, Muslim, or Yazidi.
The Catholic archbishop of Hasakeh estimates that about half the Christians have fled his diocese because of the Turkish invasion, and estimates a similar percentage for Qamishli nearby. Most NGOs (including Doctors Without Borders) have also fled, and hospitals are either closing or offering only limited services.
Qamishli is one of the few places in northeast Syria where the Syrian government has stationed troops (at the airport and in the government security square). During the Syrian civil war, although attacked by ISIS, and mostly controlled by the Kurds it to some extent became an non-sectarian refuge in northeast Syria. It is unclear what Turkey will do against the city, which is in the 30-km zone that Turkey is invading.
Today the Russian-owned news agency Sputnik gleefully reported that American servicemen are evacuating from Syria via Qamishli to Iraq. Perhaps the US troops can wave goodbye to Qamishli’s remaining residents as the troops abandon the city.