USAID awards $6.8m to help religious minorities in Iraq

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Northern Iraq’s displaced ethnic and religious minorities are to receive additional support after the US Agency for International Development (USAID) awarded $6.8 million to charities helping survivors of Islamic State (ISIS) attacks on their homeland.

Mike Pence, the US vice president, awarded the money to the Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and The Solidarity Fund Poland, USAID said Saturday.

“USAID made an award of $6.8 million to CRS, which is working in partnership with the Chaldean Catholic Archdiocese of Erbil, to assist vulnerable families with their immediate household needs and to ease their return home when possible,” according to a USAID statement sent to Rudaw. 

Iraq’s Yezidi, Christian, and Kakai minorities suffered mass displacement and even acts of genocide in 2014 when ISIS jihadists swept across northern Iraq, devastating some of the world’s oldest religious communities.

Pence, who describes himself as an evangelical Catholic, unveiled the Genocide Recovery and Prosecution Response Program during the Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom conference in late July 2018.

USAID also said a separate award amounting to $528,500 will be provided to “a multi-donor project to deliver high-quality health care to communities affected by the persecution of ISIS”.

“Beneficiaries will include displaced people who are living in camps and non-camp locations in northern Iraq, as well as disadvantaged members of host communities. The activity will fund two stationary clinics and one mobile medical team,” it added.

USAID is working with elected officials, community leaders, local and faith-based non-governmental organizations, and the private sector to help religious and ethnic minorities targeted by ISIS improve their living conditions, expand their economic opportunities, and promote democratic participation.

“Assistance from the US Government to support persecuted ethnic and religious minorities in northern Iraq now totals nearly $380 million,” the agency said.

Nineveh province and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq are historically some of the most diverse places in the Middle East, where Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish, and Levantine cultures meet. 

At different times pre-Abrahamic, Abrahamic, and other ethno-religious minorities like Yezidis have coexisted, albeit not always without conflict.

In a bid to preserve the dwindling Christian and Yezidi populations, Pence announced in 2017 that USAID funding could go directly to faith-based NGOs.

Pence told the 2018 Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom the US had dedicated $17 million to religious minorities and “vulnerable communities” living on the Nineveh plains.