Catholic monks refuse to leave monastery despite ISIS threat

St. Matthew’s Monastery is recognized as one of the oldest Christian monasteries in Iraq and is said to be up to 1,600-years-old.

“We can see the battles and the airstrikes from here in front of us, especially at night. The sky lights up at night, but we of course are not scared. God protects us,” Ibrahim, one of three monks who resides in the monastery says.

USA Today reports that the monastery is situated on the side of Mount Al-Faf in North Iraq’s Nineveh Plains.

Today, the beige stone structure looks down on the rolling hills of one of Iraq’s most active front lines against the Islamic State, less than four miles away.

The horizon is spotted with pluming towers of white and black smoke from U.S.-led coalition airstrikes and heavy artillery fire. From this front line, Islamic State territory stretches back to Mosul, the group’s largest Iraqi stronghold.

The proximity of the Islamic State to St. Matthew’s means the monastery is constantly at risk. The extremist group is known for destroying churches, museums and other culturally and historically significant sites.

Last week, the militants seized the Syrian city of Palmyra and its ruins, described by the United Nations as “one of the most important cultural centers of the ancient world.”

The city’s fall left the world holding its breath in anticipation of the UNESCO World Heritage site’s destruction.

St. Matthew’s is safely under Kurdish peshmerga military control for now. But Sahar Karaikos, one of six students at the monastery, fears what could happen if the Islamic State advances closer.

“We are not scared, because our teachers give us a feeling of peace here, but we know we are on the front lines, and in seconds the Islamic State could be here,” Karaikos says. “I don’t even want to think or speak about the destruction the Islamic State would cause if they took our monastery.”

While monks at the monastery say they are confident God and the Peshmerga forces will protect the site, they have removed their most precious relics, including centuries-old Christian manuscripts. The tomb of the monastery’s namesake, St. Matthew, lies empty – the bones have been moved north into the relatively safe territory of the Kurdish Regional Government.

Most of the residents from the villages below the monastery, including Karaikos’s family, also sought refuge in that region after fleeing in August, when the Islamic State advanced on the area. The three monks at the monastery and all six students, however, resolved to stay.

From the monastery’s stone terraces, Karaikos can see his village, Bartalla, a Christian town that dates back more than 1,000 years. Today, as he points out his abandoned village from high on the mountainside, thick plumes of smoke billow up from Bartalla’s skyline.

“(The Islamic State) does not understand what history means, they just understand the breaking of history,” he says. “If a people don’t have the history of their past, then they will not have a future because they won’t know what their origins are, where they came from.”