Iraq: Full Report – Part I

I was in Iraq for eight remarkable days last month, and in Part II of this report I’ll tell you how I was privileged to help make Middle-East history. But there was one day, August 21, 2017, our second day on the job, that has since taken on a life of its own. In fact, it was a drama that nearly took several of our lives. And for that reason, it forms a fiery preamble to our historic mission.

We were in Kurdistan, Iraq’s largely autonomous northern province, at the invitation of the regional government. Their Interior Minister/Defense Minister had invited us to interview Christian leaders in Kurdistan and the adjoining Nineveh Plain, and based upon those leaders’ desires, to help the Kurdish government compose clear constitutional guarantees and protections for Christians and other religious minorities, should Kurdistan declare independence from Iraq.

Although our assignment to interview the Christian leaders began on Sunday, August 20th (see Part II), all 13 of our delegation were eager for our Monday day trip to Qaraqosh, a predominantly Christian town on the Nineveh Plain, just across the provincial border from Kurdistan, and thus under Baghdad’s military control. We had originally planned to go to Mosul, recently liberated from ISIS and just 15 miles further on, but due to a recent rash of kidnappings, were advised to stop at Qaraqosh, once a city of 70,000 Christians, but now home to only about 10,000 souls brave enough to return and start rebuilding.

We left the Kurdish capital of Erbil on Monday morning in a diplomatic convoy of four black Land Cruisers, flanked front and back by camouflaged trucks carrying a total of 20 Peshmerga soldiers, members of Kurdistan’s famed army who, outside of Israel, constitute perhaps the finest military force in the Middle East. In fact, although Iran is trying to claim credit, it was the courageous Peshmerga who this summer liberated Mosul and routed ISIS from the area.

An hour after leaving our hotel, and having passed through a couple of checkpoints, we pulled up to the Nineveh Plain border and stopped at the last guard booth to show our papers. Everything seemed routine and I pulled out my oversized iPhone to capture the moment from my backseat perch in the convoy’s lead SUV.

We hadn’t been stopped more than a minute when the Iraqi police, in their blue-tinted fatigues, failed to notice a young man in civilian clothing slipping past them and heading for the lead Peshmerga truck. Only after he ripped open a tan door and grabbed at a soldier did they move into action. And suddenly the whole world seemed to shift into high gear. Within 30 seconds the troublemaker was surrounded by armed Peshmerga and Iraqi police who shoved him away from the truck and began subduing him. But the scuffle had not gone unnoticed. In fact, it apparently had followed someone’s plan.

“They are a militia armed by Iraq,” our government host in the passenger seat in front of me would tell us a few minutes later. “But they are loyal to the Ayatollah of Iran. They hate our soldiers and someone has tipped them off that we were coming.”

I stopped videoing and lowered my phone as another man in civilian clothing—then another and another—ran past us toting automatic rifles. All at once, armed civilians were everywhere, screaming and waving weapons they didn’t look qualified to carry. Then, not more than 40 feet in front of us, someone raised a rifle skyward and—bapbap bapbapbap—fired off a volley of what sounded like a dozen rapid shots straight into the air. Another rifle—bap bap—more shots.

Now armed men were running from everywhere and surrounding our convoy. I started counting. There were easily a hundred of them, and although some wore no shoes, they all bore guns. A small Toyota pickup pulled near the booth and stopped about 30 feet in front of us and to our right. Within half a minute, a 50-caliber machine gun sat, perched and ready, on the roof of its cab. Punches were thrown at the Peshmerga, but in accordance with their orders from our hosts, none fought back. More shouting. More shots fired into the air.

“Keep them calm, Father. Keep them calm,” I prayed as I crouched down in the seat and our driver began following the troops’ lead to inch into a super-slow U-turn. My backseat partner, Pastor Mark Borrows from western Canada, and I would repeat that prayer for the next 45 minutes. “Keep them calm.”

You always wondered if you’d be brave, I told myself, as I looked through dark tinted glass at a militiaman standing no more than three feet from me with his gun at the ready. Ever since you were a kid, you’ve wondered if you’d have the courage to die for the name of Jesus. Well…what’s it going to be?

The U-turn complete, I looked up from praying and saw another pickup truck with a mounted machine gun, then just past him a huge black vehicle sporting a rocket launcher with a barrel that looked to be the size of a hurricane’s eye.

“Keep them calm.”

More volleys. More screaming. A rifle butt to the eye socket of one of our soldiers, but he sat, stoic. He and his Peshmerga brothers were under orders to hold both fists and fire unless one of our SUVs became a target.

In the passenger seat in front of me, our government guide was on the phone with the Defense Minister. “Help is on the way,” he assured us. Then I noticed the stubby Uzi submachine gun he had pulled out of his satchel. It was resting on the drink holder between the front seats, its barrel pointed back at me.

“Uh, would you point that forward, please?” I whispered, and then resumed my one-line petition. “Keep them calm, Father. Keep them calm.”

More shots, probably a hundred or more, and more screaming and shoving and rifle-butting.

40 minutes that felt like 40 days in this wilderness had passed now, and suddenly we were creeping forward and being waved past the rocket launcher by a man who, for the moment at least, appeared to have some authority. A few seconds later, we were picking up speed and barreling back towards Erbil.

“I feel so stupid,” said Mark, my Canadian comrade. “All I could think the whole time we were praying was, how is my wife going to get my body bag all the way back to Alberta?“.

“If they’d started firing, about 500 letter-sized envelopes would’ve sufficed,” I tried to joke, but we were both too amped up to laugh.

An hour later, we were back in Erbil and headed for the hotel cafe. My closest brush with death in 49 years of ministry was over, but my pulse hadn’t gotten the memo. I looked at my Apple Watch, which had registered a range from 100-133 beats per minute for the past hour, and still showed no sign of slowing.

“The normal reaction would be to try and forget the trauma of this, right?” I asked Mark, who nodded in agreement as we took a table. “But let’s not do that. Let’s make ourselves remember, because this is what our brothers in Christ here have to live with every day of their lives. We can’t forget. We mustn’t forget”

It was about then that I realized the answer to my earlier self-examination. Would I really, after all these decades of professing Christ, have the courage to face a bullet for the name of Jesus?

“I know now, Mark,” I said. “I was ready to do it. If that guy with the rifle had ripped open my door and shoved me against the side of our SUV, I knew Jesus’ name would be the last word I spoke on this earth.”

My heart still pounds when I remember, but I don’t mind. Because now I know. I know.