Women Advocate for Religious Freedom in Washington

Political heavyweights including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi attended the recent Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, showing their support for the creation of what the Trump administration hopes will be a grassroots movement to promote the cause of religious freedom across the world. The ministerial, which was hosted by the US State Department in Washington, DC, took place over three days, from July 16 until July 18.

As each official took the stage to deliver their remarks, the global scale of this burgeoning movement loomed large.

But for Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Nadia Murad, who also spoke at the conference, religious freedom is a heartbreakingly local and personal issue.

“In the summer of 2014, ISIS invaded my ancestral homeland of Shingal and began a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Yezidi community,” Murad, who is Yezidi, said on July 16.

She told the participants that ISIS subjected her community to mass killing, forced conversions, and sexual violence, with more than 6,000 people enslaved and more than 400,000 displaced.

“I lost nine family members during this genocide. Twenty-one women and girls from my family were taken into captivity, including myself. I have 19 nieces and nephews that will grow up without a father,” she said. “This is just one story of one Yezidi family.”

Murad was among several women from Iraq and Iran who came to the ministerial, determined to make their religious communities’ experiences of persecution known.

For Dabrina Bet Tamraz’s Christian community, persecution is not meted out by ISIS and its brand of terrorism —  but instead by the Iranian government’s oppression.

“Terrorists, Zionists, spies, a threat to national security: This is how Evangelical Christians are referred to in my native country Iran,” Bet Tamraz, an Assyrian pastor and human rights activist, said during a panel on religious freedom in the Middle East on July 17. 

She told the panel’s audience that Iranian authorities have harassed members of her family for their religion for as long as she can remember. She said that she, her mother, father, and her brother have all been detained and arrested for practicing their religion, with both her father and her mother having received prison sentences in Iran.

“Religious minorities, along with any groups that the Iranian regime deems as a danger to itself, are under significant pressure,” said Dr. Tuğba Tanyeri-Erdemir, Coordinator of the New York-based Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) Task Force on Middle East Minorities, who spoke with IranWire by email. (IranWire’s founder and editor-in-chief, Maziar Bahari, is a member of this task force.)

In predominantly Shia Muslim Iran, the minority Jewish, Assyrian and Chaldean Christian, Armenian Christian, and Zoroastrian communities are given nominal representation in the government, though this does not mean that these communities do not face discrimination. However, Tanyeri-Erdemir said that the Baha’i and Evangelical Christian communities, which are not represented in the government, are “particularly vulnerable” to government abuses. The Baha’i faith is not recognized by Islamic Republic officials.

“Systematic discrimination against the Baha'is and ongoing persecution of Evangelical Christians constitute some of the most severe human rights abuses by Iran,” she said.

 

Iraq’s Religious Communities Under Attack

The persecution and discrimination that the Middle East’s Christian communities have faced in recent years, particularly in Iran and Iraq, have been a focus of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, even as members of the Iraqi Chaldean Christian community in the US have been targeted for deportation.

However, representatives from the Chaldean community were among those honored by the State Department at the ministerial.

Pascale Warda, president of the Iraq-based Hammurabi Human Rights Organization (HHRO), and her husband William Warda, the organization’s public relations officer, received the inaugural International Religious Freedom Award for the organization’s efforts to document atrocities and abuses against Iraq’s religious minorities.

During a press gaggle in advance of the award ceremony, Pascale Warda discussed the persecution that Christian communities in Iraq have faced throughout history, with the most recent iteration being at the hands of ISIS.

She called Daesh — the Arabic acronym for the group —  an ideology that, in addition to fueling genocide against Yezidis and Christians, has also placed a “burden even [on] Islam, because all Muslims don't believe in the same way and don't accept this very heavy reputation they laid to Islam.”

In a separate interview with IranWire on the sidelines of the ministerial, Warda said that while blame for continued persecution and hardship in post-ISIS Iraq lies in part with the Iraqi government, one of the greatest issues facing the country and its people —  including its minorities — is continued interference by Iraq’s neighbors, primarily Turkey and Iran.

Neither Turkey nor Iran were invited to send delegations to last week’s ministerial, while a delegation from Iraq participated in the plenary meetings on July 18.

Turkey’s military maintains a presence in northern Iraq as part of its campaign against the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), a militant group that has been carrying out an insurgency against the Turkish state since the 1980s. The PKK has long had a base in northern Iraq’s Qandil mountains, which have been the target of frequent Turkish air operations. These operations have also struck civilian sites and communities, including in the Yezidi homeland of Sinjar, an issue that Nadia Murad has discussed with Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavuşoğlu.

Just as Turkey’s military presence in northern Iraq has caused tension with Baghdad and communities in northern Iraq, so too has the presence of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), predominantly Shia militias that, while instrumental in the Iraqi campaign against ISIS, have come under scrutiny for their links to Tehran. Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi visited Tehran on July 24 to discuss the PMU with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. The units have been given an ultimatum by the Iraqi government to fully join the state’s armed forces by July 31.

“Unfortunately, Iraq is [surrounded] by many countries who [do] not necessarily like the good life and the good luck [sic] for Iraq,” Warda told IranWire, noting that the time that the Iraqi government must spend on managing its neighbors takes away from its internal problems, such as post-ISIS reconstruction and the prevention of further violence against religious minorities.

The US government has played a role in that prevention, launching the Genocide Recovery and Persecution Response Program at last year’s ministerial as part of efforts to provide relief to communities devastated by ISIS. At this year’s events, USAID Administrator Mark Green told participants that the program had already provided $340 million as part of the initiative. Following the ministerial, USAID announced the provision of an additional “$27 million in humanitarian assistance for ethnic and religious minorities in the Ninewa Plains and Western Ninewa Province.”
 

Addressing the Persecution of Middle East Minorities

The ministerial shone a spotlight on the various actors — both governmental and non-governmental — striving to address the persecution of religious minorities in the Middle East.

One such group, the ADL, founded its Task Force on Middle East Minorities to protect not just religious minorities but also ethnic and sexual minorities, according to Dr. Sharon Nazarian, the chair of the task force and a Senior Vice President of International Affairs at the ADL.

“The ministerial made it crystal clear that in order to move the agenda of Freedom of Religion or Belief, groups need not only to work together, but also need to advocate for one another,” Nazarian told IranWire via email. Her participation in the ministerial included taking part on a panel on “Best Practices in International Religious Freedom Advocacy" on July 17.

Warda told IranWire that while she was initially not optimistic about the ministerial’s potential impact, worrying that it would be another case of high-level talk without significant action, she felt that the meetings had contributed to moving the needle on issues affecting her community.

“[The State Department] is a place of decisions,” said Warda, who has been visiting Washington to advocate for her community and to present the results of HHRO’s work since 2004. This included HHRO being presented a Human Rights Defender award by the State Department under President Obama in 2012.

Asked what the impact of the ministerial had been on issues facing her community, Warda said that it had elevated “the voice of voiceless people.”

Even so, more progress can always be made, Tanyeri-Erdemir said.

“One point for the next ministerial would be to include minorities that are the victims of multiple-discrimination,” she said. “For example, women and members of LGBTQ communities can be particularly vulnerable.”

Meanwhile, despite efforts by actors including USAID and HHRO to aid in Iraq’s reconstruction, minority communities such as the Yezidis still face persecution, trauma, and displacement in the aftermath of ISIS.

During a meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office on July 17, Murad described her community’s ordeal to the president, who asked her afterward why she had won the Nobel Prize. She appealed to him to help the Yezidis find safety, relating that her community’s homeland is currently at the center of a struggle for territory and control between Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government. Trump said the US “would look into it very strongly.”

At the ministerial, Murad was clear about the consequences should her community’s right to exist and practice as a religious minority not be protected.

“Next month will mark the fifth anniversary of the Yezidi genocide,” she said. “If the international community does not act swiftly, my community will disappear from their homeland.”

 

Read more about the Washington, D.C. ministerial: 

Women’s Rights and Religious Freedom: A Contradiction in Terms?

“Do not reward evildoers with notoriety”

Survivors of Religious Persecution Encourage Solidarity and Forgiveness