The history pages of Iraq’s
Christian community lie in charred fragments on the floor of a
fourth-century monastery near Mosul which IS militants ransacked during a
two-year occupation that ended over the weekend.They removed the site’s crosses and tried to erase any mention of Behnam, the son of an Assyrian king who, according to popular legend, built the monastery as penance for killing both his children after they converted to Christianity.
“Their fundamental goal was to destroy Christian history and civilisation in the Nineveh plains,” Duraid Elias, commander of the Babylon Brigades, a Christian militia that helped retake the site, told Reuters during a visit on Monday.
The Nineveh plains, a sprawling region north and east of Mosul, are a mosaic of ethnic and religious communities with roots dating back to ancient Mesopotamia.
The Sunni Muslim hardliners of Islamic State targeted the adherents and religious sites of those minority groups across the area, which it seized in 2014 during a blitz across Iraq and neighboring Syria.
At the time, the group issued an ultimatum to Christians: Pay a tax, convert to Islam, or die by the sword. Most fled towards the autonomous Kurdish region, including a few dozen monks who left Mar Behnam with only the clothes on their backs.
As a 100,000-strong alliance of Iraqi forces now attempts to oust Islamic State from the city of Mosul, the scale of destruction in nearby Christian areas is gradually being documented.
The jihadists had converted Mar Behnam, Iraq’s largest monastery, into a headquarters for the Hisba - morality police, which enforced strict rules against such things as smoking, men shaving their beards, and women baring their faces in public, according to Commander Elias.
A sitting room had been turned into a medical clinic, and the monks’ bedrooms were used to hold transgressors.
A remote corner of the complex was filled with dozens of satellite dishes the commander said had been confiscated from residents nearby.