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AL
QOSH, Iraq — Compared with the ferocity of war
in much of Iraq, the isolated Monastery of the
Virgin Mary — 25 miles north of Mosul — exists in
tranquility.
Surrounded by desert, this cool shelter — complete
with olive trees, honeybees and a Chaldean church —
houses six monks and 36 orphaned boys, ages 5 to 14.
Twenty-two girls live at a convent in nearby Mosul.
Over the years, the Rev. Mofid Toma Marcus, 37, an
Assyrian Christian monk in charge of the monastery
and orphanage, has kept the wolves away. During
dictator Saddam Hussein's reign, he passed off his
orphanage as a seminary for students preparing for
the priesthood, because the government was not
anxious to let the outside world know the actual
number of orphans in the country.
Even today, when the boys, dressed in jeans and
T-shirts, line up after their naps and are asked how
many want to become priests, six raise their hands.
They will go to a Catholic seminary in Baghdad.
The fate of the other boys is uncertain, because
Father Marcus will not give them up for adoption to
Muslim families.
"In an Iraqi orphanage, they make you change your
religion," the monk said, "and I don't want our
Christian kids to be Muslims."
Bound by law
He wishes he could send them to places like Detroit,
which has many Iraqi Chaldean families who belong to
the same ancient stream of Christianity and are
willing to raise an orphaned child. Although the
U.S. State Department says it has received many
inquiries from American citizens asking about
adoption, its Web site says adoption is not possible
under Iraqi law.
One reason: Adoption is prohibited under Islamic
law, which informs Iraqi civil law. Unlike in the
West, orphaned Muslim children do not take the name
and family relationships of their new parents.
Instead, Islam allows "kefala," a type of
guardianship in which children retain their original
family identities.
But U.S. immigration law considers kefala
insufficient for immigration purposes. Moreover,
anyone raising a child under the kefala system must
promise to raise the child as a Muslim.
"The chances of adopting a Muslim child is nil,"
said Roni Anderson, a former Southern Baptist
missionary who worked with Father Marcus for 12
years — until this year. "They'd prefer the child be
stranded than be adopted by a Christian."
However, Father Marcus' charges are Christians and
not subject to Islamic law. To date, Iraqi law has
not permitted foreigners to obtain legal
guardianship of Iraqi children. But Iraqis living
abroad might be allowed to do so.
Much depends on whether human rights issues for
women and children are addressed in the new Iraqi
Constitution and whether adoption is part of
subsequent international treaties or agreements
between Iraq and the United States.
So, Father Marcus' charges continue to live in
limbo.
Making do
A Chaldean Christian businessman in Michigan has
collected 1,200 pairs of shoes and 50 IBM computers,
but the priest cannot afford to have them shipped.
It is also difficult to get large amounts of freight
across the Turkish-Iraqi border without spending a
lot of money and finding trustworthy shipping
agents.
But the boys' sleeping quarters are clean and
spacious, a doctor visits once a week, and during
the summer, some of the children are sent to live
with families. U.S. troops based at Camp Freedom in
Mosul have brought in toys supplied by Army
chaplains from around the world.
Off-duty soldiers also built a playground, complete
with paintings of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and
put in air conditioners. In the entrance hall of the
boys' dorm is a painting of a scale with a child in
one bucket outweighing another bucket with the word
"money."
"A child is the best investment in life," the
caption reads.
Although all the children can sing, in English,
"Jesus Loves Me" and "This Little Light of Mine,"
all conversation at the orphanage is in Aramaic.
"We think Kurdish is a Muslim language," the monk
said, "and so is Arabic. Jesus spoke in Aramaic."
Iraq has been called "a nation of orphans, widows
and the handicapped" because of its recent, frequent
wars, including an eight-year conflict in the 1980s
with Iran that left 2 million dead.
The orphans poke about in dumps, sleep outdoors and
hang around hotels, busy intersections, mosques and
U.S. military installations. They are used as sex
slaves and prostitutes, drug runners and spies.
Estimates of their true numbers range from 1.5
million to 5 million, but there is no national
policy on what to do with them.
In Baghdad, some mosques have taken over state
orphanages. The status of the children in them is
complicated by the fact that some might have living
parents who sent their children outside of a war
zone to live with relatives or got separated during
an evacuation.
Help from abroad
Robert Anderson and his wife, Roni, spent 12 years
as Southern Baptist missionaries in Mosul and in
Adana, Turkey. He estimates that one in four
children in northern Iraq is orphaned, on the street
because his or her parents cannot support them or
working hard for almost no money.
"In some villages and remote areas," he said, "the
figures are even more alarming. It is not too
far-fetched to say that across all of Iraq, more
than 2.5 million kids are neglected pitifully."
In the Kurdish portion of northern Iraq, a woman can
be killed for looking at a man through the gate of
her home, he said.
"Any suspicion of wrongdoing is enough to eliminate
her," he said. "It's enough to cause many orphans to
exist."
Through the nongovernmental organization Concern for
Kids, Mr. Anderson is seeking Americans to move to
Dohuk, a Kurdish city near the Turkish border, to
work with orphans from Christian and the pagan sect
Yezidi tribes.
He's also advertising during lecture tours and
through the Andersons' Web site
(www.concern4kids.com) for workers to work with
street children in Sinjar, a small town near the
Syrian border.
Other groups are helping out.
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) operates
five orphanages in Iraq, aiding children in a
culture where a woman often is not allowed to bring
her children into a new husband's home.
Islam allows a man to refuse to raise another man's
children as his own. Adoption was widespread in the
ancient Middle East, dating back at least 4,000
years to the code of Hammurabi. Exodus, the Old
Testament book, says Moses was adopted by an
Egyptian princess.
There are references to adoption in the New
Testament, and adoption was practiced in Greece and
Rome as well. In fact, Julius Caesar adopted his
nephew, Octavius, who became Caesar Augustus.
It also was practiced among the Arabs and by
Muhammad, the founder of Islam.
Signs of hope
About 150 miles east of Al Qosh — also spelled Qush,
an ancient Assyrian mountain town in Nineveh named
in documents as old as 750 B.C. — in Sulaymaniyah,
there are three Kurdish-run orphanages, one for
girls, one for boys age 6 to 12 and the third for
teenage boys.
Northern Iraq has been especially hard-hit by a
succession of wars and attacks, including Saddam's
1988 gassing of the Kurdish city of Halabja, which
killed about 6,000 people and left 218 orphans.
The plight of Kurdish orphans has been dramatized in
two movies by Iranian film director Bahman Ghobadi.
His 2000 movie, "A Time for Drunken Horses," shows
the plight of five orphans who are desperate to find
medical help for their handicapped brother. His 2003
movie, "Marooned in Iraq," portrays a rag-tag group
of shivering children in an orphanage on the
Iran-Iraq border in the early 1990s.
Things have improved a little, thanks to the
prosperity of the Kurdish areas compared with the
rest of Iraq. Rashid Tahir is the director of
Sulaymaniyah Orphanage for Boys, a facility
decorated with light blue walls and children's
paintings. Green grass, rare in Iraq, fills a tiny
front yard off a dusty street near the University of
Sulaymaniyah.
Mr. Tahir said the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a
political group, offers to pay for four years of
university for each of the boys. Most of the
children have relatives who are too poor to house
them. Only two have no family at all.
"It's related to the economic situation," he said of
the homeless children. "Because the Kurdish
situation is good, we are not getting too many."
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
says it has contributed more than $420 million
through the World Food Program to feed chronically
malnourished children, especially in northern Iraq.
The London-based Kurdistan Children's Fund (KCF)
provides $15 per month for each of 2,700 children in
a "distance sponsorship" program. It has six centers
for children in Sulaymaniyah and hundreds more
children waiting to be sponsored. The biggest needs
are for clothing and school supplies for teens.
KCF also provides a day program on the second floor
of an office building in Sulaymaniyah. It includes a
music room with a drum, piano and four violins; a
computer room; pingpong tables and a ceramics lab.
In a room of children's paintings, one shows a
depiction of Elvis. Another shows a crucified
Christ.
A boy with tattered sandals, black pants, a dirty
T-shirt and sad expression just sits and watches
visitors walk by.
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