Iraq’s Christian exodus

The Arabs once had a saying about the British: ‘Better to be their enemy, for that way they will try to buy you; for if you are their friend, they will most certainly sell you.’ For Iraq’s Christians it has proved to be sage advice.

It is a lesson learned by a 25-year-old engineering student Wissam Shamouy, an Assyrian Orthodox Christian from Bakhdida in Nineveh province, who fled after jihadis gave him a second warning: leave or die. Shamouy’s mother paid a Kurdish smuggler to take him to Turkey and from there he made his way to England because he spoke the language, and was told Britain helped with ‘humanity protection’.

Instead, he was arrested for arriving with false documents and imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs for 122 days. ‘I had never been in prison in Iraq,’ he says. ‘I lived with criminals, they were fighting in front of me, taking drugs. My mother didn’t know anything about me for three months, nobody did.’ He now survives on the generosity of other Iraqi Christians and his church, receives no income support and has been waiting since last September for news of his case.

We meet at the Assyrian Centre in Ealing, home to the 5,000-strong UK community. On the walls are photographs of the Queen and Agha Petros, the first world war leader who fought alongside the Allies against the Turks. The Assyrians suffered appalling losses in that period; at least 250,000 died in the sayfo (‘sword’), the Assyrian genocide.

Afterwards, Assyrian forces remained steadfastly loyal to the British, helping to defeat the pro-Axis Baghdad government in the second world war, as well as seeing action in the Balkans. Small in number but as ferocious as their ancient forebears, the Assyrian Levies called themselves ‘Britain’s Smallest Ally’.