Another displaced Iraqi, Haytham Matti, who comes from an area east of Mosul, says that although he managed to bring most of the necessary documents with him, he knows many people who were not able to. The Christians who left later, shortly before the IS group’s deadline, lost nearly everything, from official documents to cash to their mobile phones, he says.
Some Christians in Mosul who refused to leave their homes were rounded up by the IS group and had all their possessions and papers confiscated before being released, says Matti, who is currently living in one of the basements in a church in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah.
Once the Christian families had left Mosul, the IS group began confiscating their homes and other property, distributing these to followers and fighters or making plans to sell it.
“We heard that other people were given these houses and that they used the furniture and facilities,” Matti told NIQASH. “Other houses were simply looted or even demolished. Even the doors and windows from these houses have gone.”
The troubling thing is, there don’t seem to be any official – or even semi-official – records being made that would say which property belonged to whom, that might clarify things once the IS group are driven out of Mosul.
Nobody has taken the trouble to meet with the displaced people here in order to collect information about their property, says Father Ayman Aziz Hermiz, the priest at St Joseph’s Chaldean Catholic Church in Sulaymaniyah.
“The displaced can get hold of new official papers they lost – such as identity cards or certificates of nationality as well as ration cards,” Hermiz said. “But the problem is they have to go to Baghdad to do this and a lot of them cannot afford to travel there, or stay there, in order to do this. Passports,” he added, “can be replaced in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah.”
A lot of the people who fled their homes are either thinking about leaving the country, or else they already have, says Hermiz. For example, in his church hall, he has around 40 families in residence and their living quarters are separated from the other families by only a sheet. “These conditions are very difficult,” Hermiz said.
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