ICC Note: Iraqi security forces have succeeded in liberating many Christian villages from the Islamic State militants in their efforts to retake the city of Mosul. But now, Christians fear the evidence of ISIS crimes are being eliminated in the cleanup efforts. Already in the town of Qaraqosh, the ISIS slogans have been painted over. Christians want everything documented to legitimize the terror experienced by the religious minority in Iraq during the occupation.

11/23/2016 Iraq (DW): “The best houses were occupied by their leaders,” says Father Ammar of the Syrian Catholic Church, who works closely together with the Bishop of Mosul. He flicks through his phone until he finds a picture, and reads out several names, all starting with Abu: “They wrote their names on the wall of our Church of The Immaculate. And one of their leaders lived in the house of the church,” he told DW.

Since August 2014, when IS fighters overtook the Christian towns of the Nineve Plains, Father Ammar has been living in the Christian enclave Ankawa of the Kurdish capital Irbil, like most of his flock who made up the biggest part of the community of Qaraqosh. Days after the Iraqi military liberated Qaraqosh at the end of October he went back.

“The first thing I saw was the hospital and I could not recognize it, the same for the church. I cried, that first feeling was so hard,” he says, sitting in a portacabin near the Mart Shmony Church in Ankawa, where he offers church members help and assistance.

“They are angry that the government wants to clean up in Qaraqosh, to hide the crimes,” Ammar explains. “We want to document everything, all the damage and destruction, before anything is cleaned. Already something has been changed, the IS slogans have been painted over.”

Many of the IS fighters were locals from the surrounding villages, he says. They provided the leaders with fuel for electricity and food. “Houses became clinics and pharmacies. Some were stores for weapons. The Church of Mar Gorgis became a bomb factory.”

All the houses were looted – just like the cemeteries where graves were opened to steal anything valuable buried with the dead. In one of the houses belonging to the church IS fighters kept several Yazidi women as slaves.

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