What is happening in Iraqi Kurdistan today?

I had the chance to spend 9 days in Northern Iraq—Kurdistan—this April. I took my wife back to the Kurdish town where we raised our family in the 1990s. Back then there were no known Kurdish believers, no churches among the Kurds, and no Bible. But that was then. Now there is a Wikipedia site called “Kurdish Christians” and hundreds of believers are reading the Bible in their own language. We got to meet with some of the believers of the emerging Kurdish church. One of them was jailed 8 times in the 1990s; but today the Kurdish Government is protecting the safety of the church leaders and the church property, a remarkable favor.

One day we met with three young American men who are living there for a year. They have been teaching English, even though they are barely older than the students they teach. A couple of students invited the Americans to their homes in another city. It was the first time ever that Americans had spent the night in that city. There are lots of “first time ever” events happening in Northern Iraq. One worker called Kurdistan “the other Iraq” because it is a special place where Americans are welcomed.

But a lot of Kurds want to escape to America. They are disappointed that nothing really changed after Saddam was overthrown; the new leaders seem just as corrupt, and the poor people have no one to protect them. Secret police round up the critics and jail them. It’s too simplistic to say that the answer for Kurdistan is “Jesus”. The human heart is a jungle, and who can understand it? Like Greg Livingstone says, you have to drink 200 cups of tea over a number of months before two people meet and connect at a heart level, at a trust level. That kind of connection is what I saw happening in northern Iraq, and it was pretty exciting.

Bob Blincoe