Terma Harrak had lived all of her 94 years in Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city. She was devoted to her Assyrian Christian church, spoke the language that Jesus spoke, communed at peace with her Muslim neighbours. Then the U.S. invasion toppled Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in 2003 and plunged her city into chaos. Three times, Islamist fanatics forced her to flee. Three times, she came back. But then the Islamic State known as ISIS or Daesh captured the city in 2014. Convert to Islam, they told her, or pay a fee (far more than she could afford) -- or die. It was not really a choice. With her daughter and her family, she collected identity papers and her jewels and escaped to Lebanon in the family car. They were lucky. Only hours later, other fleeing Christians were intercepted by jihadists who took everything they had, even their shoes. Mosul used to be the largest Christian city in Iraq, with some two dozen churches in town and many more in the villages of the Nineveh Plains around it. All are abandoned. The 1,800-year-old Syrian Orthodox Church of St. Ephraim, emptied of its Christian symbols, has become a mosque. "There's no more room for Christians in Mosul," ISIS publicly announced, according to Syrian Patriarch Ignace Joseph III Younan. Nor is there room in many other places in the Middle East. The proportion of Christians in the region has dropped from 13.6 percent in 1910 to 4.2 percent in 2010. Projections published in the Harvard Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy in 2014 predict Christians will be down to 3.6 percent in 2025. Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church joined in February in warning of a "massive exodus of Christians from the land in which our faith was first disseminated and in which they have lived since the time of the Apostles. . . . whole families, villages and cities of our brothers and sisters in Christ are being exterminated." If the killing and the exodus continue, Christianity will all but disappear from its cradle. How much does that matter? The Middle East was a battleground before and after the rise of Christianity. Some of its most important centres, such as Jerusalem, were under Muslim control by the ninth century. And descriptions of the reported ghastly treatment of Christians in Jerusalem stirred up support for the Crusades, just as the atrocities of the Islamic State have prompted the bombings of today. Christians have been deserting the Middle East for decades, originally for economic reasons. Nobody noticed, until videos of jihadists cutting off Christian heads appeared on television. Now Christians are suffering -- from invasions, civil war, militant Islamists -- but no more than others, and less than Shia Muslims. Sometimes, they are just collateral damage in the sectarian struggle between Sunni and Shia Muslims. The Middle East isn't even the most dangerous place to be a Christian: that honour goes to Nigeria. More Christians were killed there because of their faith last year than in all the rest of the world, according to Open Doors, a non-denominational agency. And yet, the Christian population in the Middle East matters to Ashraf Tannous, a Lutheran pastor in Palestine. A living Christian presence helps to preserve the biblical sites. It also matters to Wendy Gichuru, the United Church's program co-ordinator for Africa and the Middle East who is in regular touch with Middle East church leaders. She calls the situation "dire. . . . It's a small community, and it's frightened, like the small community 2,000 years ago." The Middle East church is a "bridge between Islam and Christianity," she adds. And it matters to Phyllis Airhart, professor of the history of Christianity at Emmanuel College, University of Toronto, not so much because of the loss of Christianity's "cradle" as the "loss of Christianity's narrative of universality. . . . Its disappearance in a whole region is a symbolic blow." Iraq It was the apostle St. Thomas who brought Christianity in the first century to a region of Iraq then known as Assyria. Its people spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. They still do. Massacres are nothing new to them. When the Turco-Mongol conqueror Tamerlane came through in the early 14th century, he butchered tens of thousands of Assyrian Christians. The Ottoman Empire killed still more. "Some historians call our church the martyred church," says Mar Emmanuel Yosip, bishop of Canada of the Assyrian Church of the East. "We can't force anyone to stay. Everyone is free. But it's a matter of the existence of the church." What's happening to the Assyrian church now, under ISIS, means its death, says Amir Harrak, professor of Near Eastern studies at the University of Toronto (and the son of Terma Harrak). It's more than a loss of religion, he says. "It's loss of a way of living, of language, of culture, of mentality." As its people are assimilated into other societies, he fears the Aramaic language they have preserved for 3,000 years will be lost. Iraq's 1.4 million Christians were no fans of former president Saddam Hussein, but under his rule they were safe. Since the U.S. invasion, more than a million have gone, and they're not coming back. They have nothing to go back to, says Aneki Nissan of the Centre for Canadian-Assyrian Relations in Toronto. "Their homes are burned down; their churches are burned down. When a million Christians have been displaced or disappeared, that's genocide by definition," he tells me. But the problem is deeper than whether Christian villages can be rebuilt. It's whether a Christian minority can ever again live peacefully with its neighbours in Iraq. Christians aren't the only victims in Iraq. Shia Muslims, seen as infidels, are the major target for fanatic Islamists, along with Shabaks, Sabaeans and especially the Yazidis, an 11th-century sect in northern Iraq that worships a peacock angel. Syria

Christians have been in Syria for 2,000 years. Before the civil war broke out in 2011, they made up about five percent of the country's population of 22 million. Jesus was known there even before Paul's encounter on the road to Damascus in AD 34, and it was Paul who established the first organized Christian church at Antioch, part of ancient Syria. It's the purported home of the head of John the Baptist (which is also said to be resting in Rome, Turkey and France), the chapel of Ananias where Ananias cured Paul's blindness, and the church of St. Simeon Stylites. "We belong to all this history and all this civilization," Jean-Cl