Iraqi Christians take part in a CSI-supported bee-keeping workshop. csi
Iraq’s Christian population has experienced a catastrophic collapse. While ongoing instability in Iraq has made precise national statistics difficult to procure, available information consistently affirms that the Christian population has plummeted. In a plea for international support this September, Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako, Patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church of Baghdad, highlighted how from a population of about 1.5 million two decades ago, Christians in Iraq now number less than 500,000. Other assessments indicate even fewer remain today. In an interview with CSI, the Hammurabi Human Rights Organization estimated the number may have fallen to as low as 250,000.
Why has the population of Christians in Iraq decreased so drastically?
A “long history” of displacement before ISIS
The crisis began long before the rise of the Islamic State. Dr. John Eibner, president of Christian Solidarity International (CSI), emphasizes that while the 2003 Iraq War “created a condition of insecurity and the Sunni militia insurgency,” the violence must be understood in a broader context.
Eibner notes that the region “knew, historically, waves after waves” of persecution against Christians. Viewed in this light, the events of 2003 and later 2014 were not anomalies, but continuations of this pattern.
“ISIS is only an episode in a long history” of displacement, Eibner remarks.
Persecution and militia control
When ISIS seized Mosul on June 10, 2014, it began destroying Christian homes, churches, and religious symbols, forcing nearly all Christians to flee. As ISIS advanced, towns like Qaraqosh, Bartella, and Karamlesh — the heart of Iraq’s Christian community — fell. Christians unable to escape were detained, forced to convert or killed. The Christian community’s cultural heritage was devastated: Churches, schools, and monasteries were destroyed, damaged, or desecrated.
The threat to Christians did not end with ISIS’s territorial defeat. Discrimination and mistreatment shape daily life for Christians and other religious minorities. Verbal and physical harassment, including sexual harassment, is “very common” for women who are visibly identifiable as non-Muslim. According to an assessment from the UK government, state authorities in Iraq have intimidated Christians at checkpoints, restricted their freedom of movement, and appropriated their property.
Compounding the threat from state authorities is the pervasive control exercised by armed non-state actors. The Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a group of mostly Shia militias, has been responsible for numerous abuses. These include preventing Christians from returning to their homes from which they were forcibly displaced and establishing Shiite settlements in traditionally Christian areas.
According to William Warda, co-founder and director of public relations at the Hammurabi Human Rights Organization (a CSI partner in Iraq), fear of the militias’ unchecked dominance is currently a greater obstacle preventing Christian returns than specific violent incidents. Still, Warda warns that any political tension could escalate into violent conflict, turning minority regions into war zones again.
Economic pressures
Beyond security, Warda emphasizes significant economic obstacles. He notes a critical lack of employment and scarce public services. Because these regions are labeled “disputed,” neither Baghdad nor the Kurdistan Regional Government invests in development, fearing the territory may ultimately belong to the other.
Warda speaks of “economic persecution,” citing examples where Baghdad closes businesses that primarily employ Christians and Yazidis, such as social clubs or alcohol stores, depriving them of their livelihoods. To combat these barriers, Hammurabi has been developing “small projects for the youth” with support from CSI. Warda stresses that young people will not return without jobs or opportunities in agriculture or industry, as they cannot survive unemployment in their ancestral homes.
Forced conversion through law
One of the insidious challenges facing Iraqi Christians stems from Iraq’s legal framework governing religious identity, particularly a 1972 law which was reinforced by the 2016 National Identity Card Law. This law mandates that “with regard to religion, minor children shall follow the spouse who converts to Islam.” This means that if one parent converts to Islam, their children under 18 must automatically be registered as Muslim on their national identity cards, regardless of the children’s or the other parent’s wishes, and in some cases even without their knowledge.
In June 2024, authorities in Dohuk informed Evlin Joseph, a Christian woman, that she and her three children must convert to Islam. When Joseph sought her national ID card, authorities told her that when she was 15 years old, her mother had converted to Islam after divorcing her father when she married a Muslim man.
Under the 2016 National Identity Card Law, the mother’s conversion automatically made Joseph herself Muslim, despite the fact that she had lived her entire life as a Christian, married a Christian man in a church ceremony, raised three Christian children, and possessed official documents identifying her family as Christian.
Discrimination in the legal system
Yet the legal system’s discrimination extends far beyond personal status law. Article 26 of the 2016 National Identity Card Law reveals the structural asymmetry embedded in Iraq’s approach to religious freedom. Non-Muslims are legally permitted to convert to Islam: The law states, “A non-Muslim may change his religion in accordance with the law.” The inverse, however, is strictly prohibited: Muslims are not permitted to convert away from Islam. Iraq’s Federal Court of Cassation has ruled that such conversion “is considered apostasy, which is forbidden in Islam.” This one-directional conversion framework, combined with the forced conversion of children when a parent adopts Islam, creates a legal mechanism that systematically reduces Iraq’s non-Muslim populations while reinforcing Islamic identity as the state’s default religious category.
In response, some Iraqi Christians have called for their own Personal Status Law, as a parallel to one recently granted to Shia Muslims. In early 2025, the Iraqi Parliament approved the Jaafari Code. This law allows Shia Muslims to be governed by their own religious legal principles for matters of marriage, divorce and inheritance, although it restricts the rights of Shiite women.
A pathway for reform
William Warda doesn’t see the solution in separate laws for each religious community, warning this would lead to “chaos” and increase division in society. Instead, Warda and the Hammurabi Human Rights Organization support a reform of the current civil law in effect.
Their proposal is to add one comprehensive section to the Personal Status Law that specifically regulates civil status matters, such as marriage, divorce, custody, adoption, and inheritance, for all non-Muslim minorities including Christians and Yazidis. This need is particularly urgent, he explains, because Christians seek equal inheritance rights for men and women. Under the current system, which defaults to Islamic law, men inherit twice as much as women.
However, Warda remains pragmatic. He notes that if all other parties receive their own separate laws, then Christians would of necessity seek their own special law to protect their civil status matters.
Essential reforms for Christian survival
The future for Iraq’s Christian minority remains uncertain. The continued erosion of the Christian presence threatens not just the community itself but Iraq’s historical and cultural diversity.
For Christians to have a future in Iraq, legal status and security reforms are essential. These include repeal of the 2016 National Identity Card Law’s forced conversion provision, comprehensive reform of the Personal Status Law to protect religious minority rights, genuine security provided by state forces rather than foreign militias, restoration of confiscated properties, and accountability for ongoing violations. Without such reforms, CSI President Dr. John Eibner warns that “the exodus will continue, potentially leading to the permanent displacement of Iraqi Christians from their ancestral homeland.”
