This World s12e05 Episode Script

Christians are being targeted, their churches destroyed.
Priests have been tortured, kidnapped and killed.
They use hammer.
They broke my teeth.
They told me, "Don't be worry.
We have all the night and you have a lot of teeth.
" Hundreds of thousands of Christians across the Middle East are fleeing the forces of Islamic extremism.
TRANSLATED: Islamic State broadcast a message to Christians from the mosque.
"Convert to Islam, pay a tax or leave the city.
" The Muslim people turned against us.
We never think this can happen.
Allahu Akbar! In the face of persecution and war, can Christianity survive in the very land where it was born? We have to provide them a dignity and right life, not to prepare them to be sheep again to be killed.
April 15th, 2015 The biblical landscape of the Plain of Nineveh in northern Iraq.
An ancient Christian civilisation once dominated this whole region.
Pilgrims have been visiting St.
Matthew's Monastery since it was founded in the fourth century.
That's when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, stretching across the Middle East.
(MEN CHANT) For 1,600 years, Christians have worshipped in this holy place, where a saint saved the life of a pagan king.
Father Yusuf's one of only six Syriac Orthodox monks left in the monastery.
Once there were 7,000 and nearly all the population was Christian.
And there's a funeral today.
The oldest monk has passed away.
His relatives have come from miles around to fill the chapel, but most days no-one dares to visit the monastery.
This ancient Christian monastery is pretty much right on the front line of ISIS.
The Islamic militants are just a couple of miles away over there, across the Nineveh Plain.
Security is tight.
Kurdish fighters keep guard around the monastery.
There's fighting nearby, Western air strikes on the Islamic militants.
Beyond the Nineveh Plain, last year IS, the so-called Islamic State, advanced across swathes of Iraq, killing thousands of Muslims.
They spread fear throughout Christian communities in the region.
Around 12 million Christians live in Iraq and Syria, in Lebanon and historic Palestine.
Many in Egypt too.
It's not the first time Islamic armies have swept across this land.
Since the Arab conquests of the 7th century first brought Islam here, Christians have survived waves of Muslim warriors.
Now IS has declared a new caliphate-- an Islamic state.
They want to turn the clock back over 1,000 years.
SINGING IN ARABIC: Under their brutal interpretation of Islam, their leader has sworn to purify the region of infidels.
The Christians of the Nineveh Plain fled as soon as they heard IS was heading their way.
Below the monastery, their villages lie abandoned.
Father Yusuf takes me to a village, home once to 54 Christian families.
How do you see this village now? - Nothing, no, it's completely silent.
- Yes.
Yeah, we can hear the planes, actually, right now.
There are air strikes going on.
When's that going to happen? Most families fled the area, but a handful-- the poorest, the old-- took refuge in the monastery, as Christians have done for centuries.
The children are cooped up here.
There's no school.
But Father Yusuf tries to keep them busy.
These Christians still pray in an ancient language, close to that which Jesus spoke.
One of the children is Nardine.
She's 13 years old.
Nardine lives with her family, six people all together in one of the monks' cells.
Nardine's village is occupied by Islamic State militants.
She's all too aware of their sexual violence against some girls they see as infidels.
Nardine's family has been left with almost nothing.
Her father's been given a job cooking for the few remaining monks.
Just below the monastery, there's a Peshmerga base.
The Muslim Kurdish fighters take me to their front line with IS.
They're holding back the advance of the Islamic militants who've killed thousands of fellow Muslims.
The Kurds don't agree with the extreme form of Islam that IS espouses.
It threatens not just the Kurds and other Muslims but the very existence of the Christians.
The monastery is just a couple of kilometres there across the ridge.
The weather's bad today, so there's a lull in the fighting.
But we've heard a lot of artillery, mortar and airstrikes in the area in the past few days.
The Christians have no army, but the Peshmerga general assures me the Kurds will protect them.
And why is it important that the Christians and Muslims should live together in Kurdistan? The Kurds are planning a major offensive with other Iraqi forces to try to retake the Plain of Nineveh from the Islamic extremists.
The Peshmerga are confident that they're going to push ISIS out of northern Iraq but even if they do that it's not certain that the Christians will ever feel safe enough to return to their homes.
When IS advanced across the Nineveh Plain last summer, they occupied Mosul, Iraq's second city.
Tens of thousands of Christians fled from here and nearby towns.
Many found a safe haven in Erbil, in Kurdistan, an autonomous region of Iraq.
Erbil's one of the oldest cities in the Middle East.
Its ancient Christian quarter is now crammed full of thousands of displaced families.
Some have taken refuge in the churches.
The gardens of St.
Elias have become a makeshift camp.
Now we have 135.
- 135 families-- displaced families? - Yes.
Father Douglas Bazi, a Catholic priest, now has a bigger flock to care for.
We are Christian, so we used to have our, you know, like our bag, luggage, always been prepared.
We are always run away, escape from place to place.
I hope that will be the end of that bad stories.
I hope.
Many of these people haven't just suffered recently at the hands of IS.
Their nightmare began more than a decade ago when Iraqi Christians became a target.
Father Douglas' family has lived here for many generations.
His parents, Josef and Susanna, are devout Christians too.
During the years Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, the family lived in Baghdad, where Father Douglas had his church.
Those were happier times for the country's 1.
5 million Christians.
They were free to practise their religion and played a full part in society.
During the Saddam the Christians, they were actually it was the golden age to us.
The Saddam regime.
Even so, as a personal, I was, you know, against the Saddam, you know, rule, or Saddam way.
But the invasion by America and Britain set in train events which made Christians victims of a wider war.
When they toppled Saddam, the coalition dismantled Iraq's government and security forces.
But they failed to govern or control the state.
It collapsed into chaos, unleashing a bitter power struggle between different Muslim political groups.
In the sectarian civil war ignited by the invasion, there was a backlash against Iraqi Christians.
Because of their religion, they were seen as connected to the Western invaders.
Churches and congregations were targeted.
America and Britain failed to protect the Christians.
They blew up my church.
They start attack priests.
When they look to the West, all the West they are Christian and the same time are infidels, and they look to us the same way.
You were seen as the community that was somehow connected to the West and you were hated because of it? 100%.
100%, yes.
After his church was attacked, an Islamic militia seized Father Douglas.
They hit my back, they broke the disc there.
They use hammer, and they broke my teeth.
And when I "pfff" with blood and they told me, "Ah, don't be worry, we have all the night and you have a lot of teeth.
" Father Douglas was held hostage for nine days, beaten and tortured until the Church paid a ransom.
A million people, two thirds of Iraq's Christians, fled the country after the fall of Saddam.
The Shia Muslim majority, suppressed for so long, began to marginalise the Sunnis, who fought back.
During the war between Sunni and Shia factions, increasingly violent Islamist groups emerged.
First Al-Qaeda in Iraq, then the more extreme Islamic State.
Last year, when IS seized large parts of Iraq, yet more Christians were driven from their homes.
So many families fled the Nineveh Plain, many had to take refuge in a half-built shopping centre in Erbil.
These Christians once had a good life.
They owned their own small businesses, they had nice houses and cars.
They were mainly well educated and their children were set for college and good careers.
Now they're reduced to this.
If these Christians had stayed in the Islamic caliphate declared by IS, they faced the harsh conditions forced on their ancestors by Muslim rulers centuries ago.
Leila and Imad Aziz fled from Mosul when IS threatened to make them second-class citizens again, even forced to pay the jizya, a heavy tax on Christians.
Though the family is now in a refugee camp, they're still preparing for an important Iraqi Christian festival.
The Festival of Nineveh is named after the ancient plain the family comes from, but they can no longer celebrate it there.
They're living now in a prefab container.
They've lost their home and everything.
What's this one here? If you look to all the history, we are the same group every time lose something.
They push us to lose our faith, our people, our role, our positions, our job.
Now we are already lose even our homes.
So what the next? The catastrophe facing Christians in the Middle East is the worst for a century.
Their last great apocalypse struck exactly 100 years ago.
Back then, the Muslim Ottoman empire stretched from modern-day Turkey across the Middle East.
A fifth of the population was still Christian.
As the empire disintegrated during the First World War, a group of nationalist army officers seized the opportunity to create an exclusively Turkish state.
There was no place for Christians from other strong ethnic groups.
Hundreds of thousands of Assyrians and Greeks were killed.
The greatest number massacred were the Armenian Christians, as many as a million and a half in what became known as the Armenian Genocide.
The Turkish government still disputes the term "genocide" and the numbers killed.
Armenian women and children starved on death marches in the deserts of Syria.
The Turks burned their houses and there was no food, nothing coming in.
They were eating animals, cats, donkeys, and they they were starving and there was real famine.
Azadhouie Kaladjian is the daughter of Armenian survivors who escaped to the Lebanon.
All these people died and my father saw these people dying.
You know, he was there among them.
Azadhouie's whole life's been overshadowed by the death of so many relatives.
I wish I had a grandmother.
I never had a grandmother.
I never had a grandfather, I didn't have any uncles.
My mother's family and my father's family, you know, they were killed.
100 years on, Islamic State has stirred up terrible memories with one specific act of violence with a clear message.
They destroyed the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Syria, commemorating the greatest massacre of Christians in the Middle East.
It is a desecration of our most holy shrine and we cannot forget this.
The shrine was the place where most of the Armenians were killed and there are many mass graves there.
Millions of Armenians went there every year, you know, to commemorate the victims of the genocide.
The destruction of the Armenian memorial-- the brutality of the Islamic militants-- has awakened new fears across Christian communities.
History repeats itself and therefore it is a very dangerous situation.
They want to destroy every glimmer of hope we will ever have any freedom to worship our Christian God.
100 years on, Christianity is being driven to the very brink once again-- this time by the rise of the so-called Islamic State.
The caliphate they declared includes not only Iraq but parts of Syria, which they control.
Until four years ago, two million Christians lived in Syria-- one in ten of the population.
The road to Damascus, the capital, was key to the history of the early Church.
It was where one of Christianity's greatest saints was struck down by a vision of Jesus.
This is one the most important places in the Middle East for Christianity.
It's where Ananias laid his hands on St.
Paul, restoring his sight and then baptising him.
St.
Paul's Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity have been sorely tested by years of war in Syria.
(THEY CHANT) The Arab Spring unleashed peaceful protests against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, another authoritarian leader like Saddam.
Under his rule too, Christians had been protected.
When Assad's regime began killing unarmed protestors, it claimed it was battling Islamic terrorism.
Some Christians took the government's side and others joined the resistance.
Many remained neutral.
Assad's regime killed tens of thousands of his own people.
As the war expanded, militant Islamist groups, armed and funded by some Sunni Gulf states, became the most effective opposition in Syria.
They made their intentions towards the Christians clear.
Islamic militants still roam the mountains north of Damascus, not far from the town of Maaloula.
It's an ancient Christian site-- a place of pilgrimage since the sixth century.
18 months ago, a suicide bomber from a group linked to al-Qaeda blew up an army checkpoint on the edge of Maaloula.
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! It sparked intense battles that destroyed much of the town.
Initially, the Syrian army entered Maaloula but quickly withdrew.
They left the Christians, some claim, to their fate.
The militants then drove into town at dawn, taking people here by surprise.
Around five o'clock in the morning, we heard a big explosion and, er we woke up.
(GUNFIRE) We saw many cars with rebels and they screaming, shouting, "Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.
" I feel like shake every time I remember this moment.
Antoinette Nasrullah was one of 3,000 Christians who fled Maaloula.
She's come back to show me where her home and business used to be.
The Blue Cafe was popular with tourists who came here.
This is our family home.
I came and I opened the cafe.
It was very lovely once.
And this is what I have left from my cafe.
That's it.
There is no roof, nothing, and it's all burned down.
That's what I have left from the cafe.
- "No smoking.
" - No smoking.
Oh, dear.
It's very sad, unfortunately, it's very sad.
No, it was my dream and this is what happened.
I'm sorry.
We have to be strong, thanks God we are alive.
Right outside Antoinette's cafe, the battles raged.
Churches and a mosque were caught in the crossfire as Assad's forces decided to take on the militants.
Local Muslims fled too, accused by Christians of supporting the rebels.
I feel angry.
Why this happen to us? You know? We don't deserve it.
We never think this is going to happen, they are going to come to destroy Maaloula.
Islamic militants desecrated the town's holiest shrine when they occupied the monastery of St.
Sergius.
Church leaders round the world condemned the kidnap of 16 nuns in Maaloula.
They were later released but have not returned.
See what they did to the cell? It's very damaged.
- The huge hole there.
- Big hole.
The rebels destroyed and stole priceless Christian treasures.
The most important, the icon, they steal the icons.
Very rich of the history.
Each one is more than 1,000 year old.
It affects us, in Maaloula affects us.
We are very sad about this, about the icons.
After seven months, Syrian government forces retook the town with the help of Christian fighters.
The soldiers who died are portrayed on posters here as martyrs, suffering with the Christians.
The Assad regime has used Maaloula to support its claim to be a bulwark against Islamic extremism.
The President himself visited the monastery when his forces retook Maaloula.
He needs minorities like the Christians to support him.
(CHURCH BELL RINGS) Some of Maaloula's Christians have started returning, rebuilding churches burnt and ransacked by the Islamist rebels.
Antoinette, who were you What were you thinking when you lit that candle? - Who were you lighting it for? - "God, please save Syria.
" (CHANTING) Maaloula is one of only three places in the world where the people still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ.
It may die out completely if this community does not survive.
Today is the Saturday before Lent and the day when the people of Maaloula traditionally remember their dead with special prayers and then visit the graves.
This year, the occasion has a particular poignancy.
(THEY CHANT) The Islamic militants killed three of Maaloula's young Christian men and kidnapped six others.
They've never been seen again.
- These are your friends.
- Yes, my friends.
Hello? Hello? Antoinette's visiting Georgette and her family, who've returned to Maaloula.
Christians here have now put their faith in Assad's regime.
They are the only one they can support us as a Christian to survive and to live in Syria, to stay in Syria, not to leave the country.
Though there's still a threat from Islamic militants, Antoinette's planning to rebuild her cafe soon.
Maaloula in my heart, I cannot leave it.
We cannot leave Maaloula.
It is important for Christians to stay, it is important, because if there is no Christian in Maaloula, I think there is no Christian in Syria.
Christians and Church leaders across Syria saw Maaloula as a warning.
Father Nawras Sammour runs the Jesuit Relief Service, a Christian charity.
What happened at Maaloula, it was for the majority of Christians a turning point, to say radicals, the majority of them, they are fundamentalists and they are not going to accept or tolerate the presence of Christians.
In a suburb of Damascus, they're literally feeding the 5,000 every day.
OK.
It's a challenge providing record-breaking quantities of food for people displaced by the war.
Maybe, how do you call it, the Guinness Record, we could have it? 12 million Syrians need humanitarian aid.
They're mostly Muslim, like these people being helped by Father Nawras' charity.
They left because of violence, all those atrocities of war.
For some families, if we don't do that, they will starve for sure.
The civil war's affected everyone here, regardless of their religion.
Actually, Christians are like others.
We are all Syrians and we have to do something for our country and that's what that was our way of serving our country in this crisis.
Syria is such a beautiful mosaic from different communities and it should stay like that, it should stay like that.
Syrian Christians face tough choices, as the opposition to Assad has become more dominated by Islamic extremists.
Today, those who are from the opposition, who have some influence, I would say, on the ground, on the field, they are ISIS and some different groups of the Islamic Front, who have, as well, an Islamist agenda, an Islamist vision of the society which I wouldn't and I couldn't accept for me as a Syrian, Christian Syrian.
More than 200,000 Syrians have died in this brutal war.
They're overwhelmingly Muslim, many killed by the Assad regime.
But despite this, many Christians here now see Assad as the only hope of their religion surviving.
They know what happened in Iraq when an authoritarian leader was overthrown, leaving Christians vulnerable to Islamic extremism.
The alternative between radicals and the present government, for the majority of Christian, - it's somehow the guarantee.
- Guarantee of safety, security, - some security at least? - Yeah.
For the majority of Christian.
But there's one country where Christians are still secure, their last bastion in the Middle East-- the Lebanon.
It's the country with the largest proportion of Christians-- a third of the population.
The Qadisha, the Holy Valley, is the heartland of the Maronites.
This tough breed of Christians has worshipped in these rugged mountains for more than 1,000 years.
They sought protection here from Islamic armies and maintained their independence.
It's still not easy to reach the isolated places where the Maronites keep their old traditions alive.
Over the centuries, there have been many hundreds of Maronite hermits here in the Holy Valley.
These are men who live their lives in solitude, praying in the mountains.
But one of them has agreed to meet me.
The founder of the Maronites was a hermit.
This austere tradition still lives on in the Qadisha Valley.
The hermit is 14 hours for praying, three for working.
We eat once every day, we sleep only five hours.
Father, you have a chapel inside the rock like a grotto.
Yes, this is a cave.
Everything is sacrificed here.
No news, no radio, no television, no telephone, nothing.
Father Dario's hermitage is also a place of pilgrimage and miracles for Maronites.
They put everything here.
I No problem.
Yes, somebody's even left some spectacles, some glasses.
They put the glasses here because maybe they get a miracle and they left them here.
- So they want to get their sight back? - That's it.
They put their name and their pictures for praying.
- I see here, here's one written in English.
- Yes.
"Please be with Father Dario, that he achieves his goal in his devotion to God.
Please heal all the sick and be with my family.
" Yes, it's in in Arabic, in French, in German, in many languages.
Father, how are you going to say all these How are you going to pray for all these people? There are hundreds of letters here.
(HE LAUGHS) The Maronites emerged from their isolation in the 11th century, when the Crusaders arrived here.
The European Christians built their fortresses in a bid to reclaim the Holy Land from Islam.
The Maronites seized the opportunity to strengthen their position by helping the Crusaders.
One of the great Crusader knights described his Maronite allies as "a stalwart race, valiant fighters of great service to the Christians in the frequent and difficult engagements they had with the Muslim enemy".
But the Crusaders raped and slaughtered in the name of Christ.
And when Islamic armies forced them out, local Christians caught the backlash.
The centuries that followed were a dark period for the Maronites-- persecution, even sometimes massacres.
In 1919, the colonial powers of Britain and France took over the region and carved it up, creating a safe haven for Christian allies.
Greater Syria was divided and the Lebanon was created, the only state with a Christian majority in the Middle East.
(BELL RINGS) In the decades after independence, the Maronites were the strongest force in a country dominated by Christians.
Hello.
You've come from Poland? You know St.
Charbel? We call him the Healer, because we have here 133,000 miracles of healing people.
Raymond Nader is well known and well connected in the Maronite church.
He runs a Christian television station.
So Lebanon for the Maronites was a Christian stronghold? We call it the fortress of the Christians.
You know? It's in our bones, in our blood to stay here.
We feel inside of us that to stay here had cost us millions of people who were killed through centuries and a lot of tears and sweat and blood.
The Maronites were central protagonists in the brutal civil war which erupted in the Lebanon 40 years ago.
Christians felt threatened by large numbers of Palestinian refugees and armed groups allied with them.
Muslims felt they were second-class citizens in this Christian stronghold.
You know, I was 13 years old when I started fighting, and all I knew then, that Christians are threatened.
Raymond commanded a Christian militia unit in this complex war involving many factions.
Our villages were devastated by Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis, Libyans, all kind of Arab militias.
So I went with all the youngsters in Lebanon to defend our villages.
Some ruined buildings in the capital, Beirut, have been left deliberately as a reminder of that sectarian war and the brutal acts committed by all sides.
It was an ugly war but, you know, the Christian militias carried out atrocities, too, you killed civilians.
It was This is what you did.
You know, the war was Yeah, it was very ugly from different sides.
There is no beautiful war.
I hate war.
The war was very, very, very tough and very fierce, very violent.
Our villages were destroyed.
300,000 out of one million and a half left the country.
During this war, I feel that we lost our position, we lost our power.
(CONGREGATION SINGS) Though they lost their pre-eminence in the civil war, the Maronites are still a force to be reckoned with today.
Thousands of them have come to celebrate the feast day of their founding saint.
The Christians are part of the delicate balance the Lebanon maintains between its political and religious groups.
They may no longer control this country, but Christians are still guaranteed key posts under the constitution.
The Christians in Lebanon are a bit different from Christians in the Middle East, because the other Christians, let's say in Syria and Iraq, they were dominated by their governments, which were Muslims, but here in Lebanon the Christians You know, the President of Lebanon is a Christian, the commander-in-chief of the army is Christian.
Representatives of Muslim parties, Sunni and Shia, have come to church to pay their respects on this important Christian feast day.
You notice that in Lebanon we don't have problems with the Lebanese Muslims, we are living together very friendly and we have built this beautiful country together.
Now the Christians in Lebanon are considered by the Sunnis and the Shias as an agent of stability, and that's great.
(WOMAN SINGS) Islamic State and other extremist groups have carried out attacks in the mountains of the Lebanon, too.
They've taken hostages and executed soldiers.
This threat from Islamic extremism has brought old adversaries together.
I went to see the leader of a powerful Muslim clan, the Druze.
His militias inflicted a devastating defeat on the Christians in the civil war.
Well, we came as a family in the 17th century and from that time on we are still here.
We were as Jumblatts one of the most important of powerful families, feudal families.
Some of Walid Jumblatt's ancestors were involved in the massacre of thousands of Maronites in the 19th century.
But now Walid is warning if Christianity doesn't survive in the Middle East then moderate Islam is doomed as well.
Christianity is a basic element of the Arab world before the emergence of Islam, and they contributed with the Muslims to Arab and Muslim civilisation.
But if you have to look around, about the future of the Christians in the Middle East, it's gloomy.
So other minorities, the Druze and others, would suffer, possibly, if Christians were forced out.
Yes, we will suffer, but, I mean, the Christians are a basic cultural, human, economic element of this part of the world, of the whole entire Middle East.
We are away from the big turmoil in Syria and Iraq.
Let's keep it like it is.
The greatest threat to Christians in the Lebanon is not the security situation.
Their numbers are slowly shrinking.
They're no longer the majority here.
The Maronite community is still around a million strong, but twice that number have moved abroad.
A lack of jobs and affordable housing is making it hard to keep the next generation here.
We have a lot of difficulties, but I'm quite sure that we will override them, because we have a strong faith and we are not only dreaming, because we have the power to stay here.
If the Christians leave the Middle East, what does the region lose? The Middle East without Christians is like a desert, it's one colour, it will lose their colours, it will be in black and white.
The Christians of the Lebanon have a good chance of holding on, but only if their children feel they have a future in the region.
That's not certain when you look at where it all began, historic Palestine.
The Christian community has dramatically declined in the very place where Christ was born, in the little town of Bethlehem on the West Bank, Palestinian territory occupied by Israel.
It's not Islamic State that threatens Christians here but a slow process of attrition.
Decades of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians have driven many Christians to emigrate.
In the 1920s, Bethlehem was almost completely Christian.
Only one Muslim family lived here.
But now only a third of the town's inhabitants are Christian.
The Church of the Nativity marks the very place where Christ was born in a manger.
It's somewhere every devout Christian in the world wants to visit.
Much of Bethlehem's economy depends on pilgrimage and tourism, and that always suffers when there's conflict in the Holy Land.
Salaam.
How are you? Salaam.
I went to the workshop where they make candles for the church to meet the owner.
Ramzi Mazri and his assistant James Safar are Christians whose families have lived in Bethlehem for generations.
But they may not be here much longer.
During the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation a decade ago, the Church of the Nativity itself was besieged.
Israeli forces battled Palestinian militants who'd taken refuge inside.
Many Christians left Bethlehem following the uprising.
Life is hard in Bethlehem.
The town's now partly surrounded by the Wall.
Israel says it built this separation barrier for its security.
But Christians say it restricts their movement.
Violence still regularly flares up in Bethlehem between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians.
Some Christians also complain of discrimination against them by the Muslim majority, and they fear increasing Islamic extremism in the area.
Most of Ramzi's close family have already left for America and Australia.
Many Palestinian Christians are well educated and can often get visas and jobs abroad.
Ramzi and his wife, Samar, sometimes argue about the future.
Many Christians in Bethlehem feel cut off from the greatest place of all in the life of Christ, just five miles away.
Jerusalem is where three of the greatest religions on Earth come together, making this the holiest city on Earth.
Two of those religions are still thriving in the Holy Land.
Judaism is secure in the state of Israel, and prayers in Jerusalem's great mosques echo those across the Middle East where Islam is pre-eminent.
Only Christianity is in terminal decline.
They still worship in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, on the site of Jesus's tomb, but most visitors are from far away, from places where the religion's growing.
Soon, these most symbolic sites could become just museums for international pilgrims.
Few Christians actually live in the place where Jesus lived and died.
Islamic State goes on spreading fear with its gruesome beheading of Egyptian Christians in Libya.
The militants claim they're extending their Islamic caliphate further across the region.
As the Middle East is gripped by a wider war between Sunni and Shia powers, Christianity is hanging in the balance.
(CONGREGATION SINGS) In Iraq, Father Douglas is preparing to mark the end of the Festival of Nineveh with the latest wave of Christian outcasts.
The West bemoans their plight, urges them to stay.
But Father Douglas believes it's more important now to help his people leave Iraq than to preserve Christianity here.
I'm always actually using this hard message to the West people-- "Just wake up, and you have really to wake up.
Help us and save us.
" What can the West do? Open gates.
Give visas to my people.
We are sorry, Iraq without Christianity.
But come on, this is the last chance to my community's survival.
This is the last chance to us, believe me.
After the service, the women bring out the traditional sweets made of honey and almonds that mark the end of the festival.
The traditional sweet-- if you want to lose your teeth! This may be the last year this whole community is gathered together.
So many are planning to leave Iraq, victims of another persecution, another biblical exodus.
We are going to tell the same story to our grandchildren? Why? We have to provide them a dignity and right life, not to prepare them to be sheep again to be killed.
The religion which shaped the culture and the history of the Western world may soon be lost for ever in much of its ancient heartland.
The front-line monastery of St.
Matthew could become just a relic of Christianity.
(PRIESTS CHANT) Nadine and her family want to leave Iraq, but they have no money, nowhere else to go.
Nadine's faith is still strong.
She's put her trust in God.