invisible from the air, they said. I trudged with UN soldiers through the actual river, downstream, in these
dark ravines. But there were no pipes.
And there’s been no war. The second, far more sinister, story we’ve all covered is that the Middle East is a
sectarian quagmire in which religion and faith have created an age-old antagonism between Muslims and
Christians, between Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims and between Muslims, Christians and Jews. The
region is therefore permanently at war, its people poisoned by sectarian hatreds and doomed to eternal
conflict – which we civilised westerners must occasionally step in to sort out.
Didn’t the French and British arrive in Lebanon in 1860 to stop the Druze slaughtering the Christian
Maronites? Didn’t the British have to intervene to stop fighting between Muslim and Christian Palestinians
and Jewish immigrants in Palestine between 1920 and our humiliating retreat in 1948? Didn’t the
Americans and British and French and Italians arrive in Lebanon to end a Christian-Muslim civil war in
1982? Didn’t the Americans have to send their troops to separate Sunni and Shia death squads in 2004 and
2005 and 2006?
In our reports – certainly in mine – much emphasis was placed on the suffering of Catholic Maronites in
Lebanon, Copts in Egypt and Catholics and other Christian sects in Iraq. They were being slowly driven
from the Holy Land, we would write. I recall visiting a clutch of burnt-out Egyptian churches and bombed
churches in Iraq. The headlines – for obvious reasons – always used the word “exodus”. And the flight of
the Christians – to Europe, America, Australia – was always “of Biblical proportions”. And like all good
stories, there was an element of truth in all this. Yet on the ground, I found that the Christian priests and
vicars and bishops, while acknowledging their people’s persecution, would often plead with me to record
their own wish: that the west would stop encouraging their flocks to leave, that it should persuade the
Christians to stay in their homes in the Arab world.
Palestinians hold a banner bearing portraits of
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and Pope
Francis in front of the Church of Nativity, in
Bethlehem (AFP/Getty)In the northern Syrian city of Qamishleh, I sat beside a church with a group of Orthodox and Catholic
bishops and clergymen in a variety of black hats and red sashes. The Syrian war had been underway for four
years. Please, they begged, stop telling Christians to leave the Middle East. We had been attending a Syriac
wedding where clerics were bedecked in gold, scarlet and black robes. There were hosts of blazing candles,
a multitude of blessings, and much ululating; a very definite reminder that Christianity was an Eastern – not
a western – religion. But of Qamishleh’s 8,000 Christian souls, only 5,000 remained. Isis had seen to that.
Most of the Christians were Assyrians, the descendants of the 1915 Assyrian genocide, which accompanied
the far larger holocaust of a million and a half Armenian Christians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.
The clerics in Qamishleh – part of it still held by the Syrian regime, the rest by the Kurds — believed that
their latest “exodus” (there I go again) only began after the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq whose