Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16L et t e r f rom E r bi l Muslims, from their homes in Syria and Iraq cry to heaven. These are our people, and our hearts long to comfort them. So we jumped at the chance when our church agreed to send us to Iraq for two months earlier this year to report on the situ- ation of refugees and displaced people, and to encourage Christians suffering for their faith. When we landed in Erbil and stepped onto the soil of our homeland for the first time after so many years, we were overwhelmed, our tears of joy mixed with sorrow over all that has hap- pened to our country. We could not help noticing how decades of war have halted progress and dragged the country backward. The country’s I was raised in a nominally Christian home in Baghdad, but it was as a foot soldier in Saddam Hussein’s army during the Iran– Iraq War that I became convinced that as a follower of Jesus I could no longer kill or serve in the military. In 1990, with another war looming, I knew I would be called up again and that I faced execution if I refused to serve. I chose instead to flee Iraq with my wife, Layla, and our baby daughter. We received asylum in Sweden, and now are members of a Bruderhof community in England. Naturally, the human tragedy sweeping the Middle East these days hits especially close to home. The crimes committed by ISIS and other factions that drive people, both Christians and My Return to Iraq Twenty-six years after fleeing Saddam Hussein, a former asylum seeker goes back to visit Christians on the run from ISIS. YAC OUB YOUSIF The author and his wife, Layla, with an Iraqi Christian (center) who was injured while escaping ISIS fighters Photographs courtesy of Yacoub Yousif Yacoub Yousif is Plough’s Arabic editor. He tells his own story in a memoir, I Put My Sword Away: An Iraqi Soldier’s Journey from Battlefield to Brotherhood (Bruderhof, 2016).