Tulsa minister Terry Law hands out food packages in Kurdistan refugee camp.
Ethnic Kurds who live in Syria flee into Kurdistan to escape fighting in the Syrian civil war.
Syrian refugees live in tent city in Kurdistan.
I met this morning with Terry Law, just back from Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region of northern Iraq, where he handed out food and other aid to ethnic Kurdish refugees fleeing the civil war in their homeland of Syria.
Law has developed a special relationship with Kurdistan’s minister of the interior, Karim Sanjari, which led to his invitation to visit the refugee camps just inside of Kurdistan.
He said the Kurdistan government wants him to enlist U.S. churches to help with the overwhelming refugee problem.
Kurdistan is wide open to U.S. Christian churches coming into the camps and providing not only humanitarian help but also Christian literature, he said.
“This is a huge opportunity if we can marshal the churches,” he said.
Law heard some heart-wrenching stories.
One refugee woman told him that al Qaeda came into her village and began killing everyone in sight with machine guns and destroying the homes. She and her family dug a hole through a wall to escape into a neighbor’s house, made it to an alley out of sight of the al Qaeda gunners, and then ran five miles to the Turkish border.
I haven’t heard other commentators focus on this, but according to Terry, the civil war in Syria is part of an ancient conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, the same conflict underlying much of the unrest in the Middle East.
Syria is 70 percent Sunni and 20 percent Shia, he says, and is ruled by President Bashar al-Assad, who is Shia and is aligned with Iran and the Hezbollah, both also Shia.
Syria’s 10 percent ethnic Christians “get it from both sides. It’s been a horror story,” Terry said.
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