By ICC Fellow Lisa Navarrette  

On an ordinary August evening in 2014, Mariam was preparing dinner while her husband, Nabil, closed the small repair shop his family had owned for decades.

Their two children were arguing over who would use the television first. Somewhere in the distance, a church bell sounded. It was the kind of evening that had repeated itself hundreds of times, so familiar that no one imagined it could disappear overnight.

Then the phone calls began. A cousin warned them that Islamic State group fighters were advancing. Another caller said families were fleeing. Rumors spread faster than anyone could verify them: roads were closing, homes were being marked, and Christians were being told to leave, convert, pay a religious tax, or risk death.

Nabil told the children to pack one bag each. Mariam stood in the bedroom staring at a closet filled with clothes, family photographs, baptism certificates, wedding gifts, and blankets her mother had made years earlier. She had only minutes to decide what parts of her life could fit into a suitcase. She chose identification papers, medicine, a change of clothes, and a photograph of her parents.

Before leaving, Nabil locked the front door. It was an ordinary gesture, almost automatic. He still believed they would be back.

The family joined a stream of cars heading toward Erbil. Some vehicles were packed with grandparents and children. Others carried mattresses tied to their roofs. Families whose ancestors had lived in the region for generations were suddenly moving through the darkness without knowing where they would sleep the next night.

From the back seat, the children kept asking the same question: “When are we going home?”

At first, Mariam answered, “Soon.” Eventually, she stopped answering.

Days became months. The family lived first in temporary shelter and later in a cramped apartment shared with relatives. Nabil could no longer open his shop. The children entered new schools. Mariam learned that neighbors had scattered across Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Europe, Australia, and the United States.

Eventually, ISIS was pushed out of the area. Technically, the family could return. However, returning was not the same as going home. Their neighborhood had been damaged. Friends were gone. Jobs were scarce. Security remained uncertain. The church still stood, but many of their Christian brothers and sisters were gone. Years later, Mariam still kept the key to the family’s old house in a kitchen drawer. It opened a door, but not the life they had left behind.

For families like this, displacement statistics can obscure human reality. The collapse of Iraq’s Christian population was not simply a demographic shift. It happened household by household: one locked door, one abandoned business, one frightened child, and one family deciding that their ancestral home was no longer safe.

An Ancient Christian Homeland

Christianity in Iraq is not a recent arrival or a religion imported from the West. Christian communities have existed in Mesopotamia since the faith’s earliest centuries. Assyrian, Chaldean, Syriac, Armenian, and other Christian communities built churches, monasteries, villages, schools, and businesses across the region long before modern Iraq was formed. Syriac-speaking Christian communities preserved ancient liturgical traditions and forms of Aramaic connected to the language spoken in Jesus’s time.

For generations, Christianity was woven into northern Iraq’s cultural and religious landscape. Mosul was one of the most important centers of that Christian presence. According to International Christian Concern (ICC), Iraq was home to roughly 1.5 million Christians about two decades earlier.

By 2023, that number had fallen to about 150,000 believers. If those estimates are used, Iraq lost roughly 90% of its Christian population within a generation. The decline is extraordinary, but it did not begin with ISIS.

The story of disappearing Iraqi Christianity cannot begin in 2014. Christians had already been leaving for years. Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s government, the country entered a period of political instability, insurgency, terrorism, and sectarian conflict.

Christians often found themselves especially vulnerable. Churches were attacked. Christian businesses were targeted. Clergy members were kidnapped or killed. Families faced intimidation and threats. Weak government institutions and deteriorating security convinced many Christians that remaining in Iraq meant accepting an increasingly uncertain future.

By the time ISIS emerged, thousands of Christian families had already concluded that their children might be safer somewhere else. That distinction matters. ISIS became the most recognizable symbol of Christian persecution in Iraq, but it did not create the conditions that first pushed Christians to leave. It accelerated an exodus that was already underway.

ISIS Expands

In June 2014, ISIS captured Mosul. Soon afterward, the organization declared its self-proclaimed caliphate from the city. For Christians, the consequences were immediate. Then ISIS turned toward the Nineveh Plains, an area containing some of Iraq’s oldest Christian towns and villages.

On Aug. 6 and 7, 2014, Christian communities emptied as militants advanced. Families fled Qaraqosh and surrounding towns toward territory controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government. ICC later described the events as a genocide that fundamentally changed Iraq’s Christian population.

Behind the fleeing families were houses, farms, churches, businesses, schools, family photographs, and generations of history. Some families believed they would return within days.

Instead, displacement lasted for years. Many never returned at all.

Ten years later, ICC reported that only a fraction of Iraq’s Christian population had returned to rebuild homes, churches, businesses, and farms across the Nineveh Plains. ISIS was eventually driven from much of the territory it had seized, but by then many of the families were gone.

The military defeat of ISIS created something Iraqi Christians had desperately wanted: the possibility of returning home. Those who returned rebuilt houses, reopened shops, repaired churches, replanted fields, and attempted to restore communities that ISIS had tried to destroy. Those efforts became remarkable demonstrations of resilience. But rebuilding a building is easier than rebuilding trust.

Families remembered how quickly security collapsed in 2014. They remembered fleeing with almost nothing. They remembered neighbors disappearing, government institutions failing, and armed extremists attacking and killing their friends and neighbors. Returning would require more than repairing a house. Families had to believe that what happened once would not happen again. Many could not.

The Exodus Continues

The defeat of ISIS did not eliminate the forces pushing Christians from Iraq. For many families, returning meant going back to areas where employment remained limited, infrastructure was damaged, political instability persisted, and competing armed groups still influenced local security.

In 2023, ICC documented the Christian efforts and challenges to rebuild the Nineveh Plains. The decision is more complicated than whether a house is still standing. Parents must ask themselves important questions. Can I find work? Will my children have a future here? Will our property remain ours? Who controls the roads and checkpoints? Can the government protect us? Could another extremist movement emerge?

A family does not need to see militants approaching its village before deciding to leave. Sometimes the memory of the last attack is enough. That is one reason the disappearance of Iraqi Christianity has continued even after ISIS lost its territory.

The most dramatic form of Christian disappearance occurred in 2014, when entire communities fled within hours.

What followed has been quieter. One family emigrates. Then another. A young adult leaves for university and never returns. A doctor moves abroad. A business owner decides rebuilding is too risky. Parents join relatives already living in Europe, Australia, or North America. The local congregation becomes smaller. Christian school enrollment declines. Young Christians have fewer opportunities to find spouses within their own communities.

Eventually, emigration begins producing more emigration.

The Question Has Changed

Iraqi Christianity survived ISIS. Churches reopened. Families returned. Christian worship continues across the Nineveh Plains, Kurdistan, Baghdad, and elsewhere. However, survival is not the same as recovery or security.

When a Christian population once numbering well over a million falls to only a fraction of that size, the question can no longer simply be: Did Christianity survive ISIS? The more difficult question is: Can Christianity in Iraq remain large enough to sustain itself for another generation?

ICC continues working alongside Iraq’s Christian communities as they rebuild after years of persecution and displacement.

In the Nineveh Plains, ICC has helped hundreds of Christian families during displacement and return, while also supporting efforts to restore homes, livelihoods, small businesses, and community infrastructure. More recently, ICC highlighted projects that helped Iraqi Christian families reopen shops and rebuild sources of income so returning home could become sustainable.

Part three of this series will turn to Syria, another land where Christianity reaches back almost to the beginning of the faith itself. There, more than a decade of civil war, extremist violence, displacement, economic collapse, and political uncertainty have transformed Christian communities with astonishing speed. Part one can be found here.

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