ICC Note: The Christian community in Iraq is largely disappearing. Many of the cities and villages that have been homes to Christians for centuries are either empty or occupied by Islamic extremists. Some Christians have made the decision to attempt to defend their homelands. Despite limited support from the national military forces (Iraqi Security Forces from Baghdad or the Kurdish Peshmerga), the Christian militias are trying defend their land and enable the Christian community to return safely to the lands that are their homes.

11/09/2015 Iraq (CS Monitor) – On the outside, the house is fortified with sandbags and machine guns. On the inside hang pictures of Jesus and Mary.

The house, in the last village before the territory of the Islamic State (IS) begins here in northern Iraq, is a base for Dwekh Nawsha, one of the Assyrian Christian militias participating in the battle against IS.

Last year, the jihadists’ lightning advance across northern Iraq captured part of the Nineveh Plain, historic homeland of Iraq’s Assyrian minority, forcing thousands of Christians to flee. Now some of them are on the front lines, fighting for their homeland.

Samir Nwa Oraha, the local militia commander and a former special forces soldier in the Iraqi Army, says it wasn’t a difficult decision to pick up a weapon once again to protect the land of his people.

“My heart is here. I want to be fighting,” he says. “Outsiders are protecting us and we can’t sit and watch. We have to share the responsibility with them.”

The outsiders he refers to are the peshmerga, the armed forces of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq, who are leading the fight against IS in the region. But they retreated from many Christian villages without a fight last summer, declining to protect them from the IS advance.

…