Okemos doctor says ISIS wiping out Christian history
OKEMOS – In recent weeks, Dr. Maher George Al-Sheikh has seen photos and heard survivor accounts that resurrected fears harbored since his childhood.
Terrorists from ISIS had rolled into Tel Keppe, the town where he was born in northern Iraq, and made an example of Sacred Heart Chaldean Catholic Church — the first church Al-Sheikh ever knew — and its worshippers.
"They toppled the cross on the dome of the church and put up their flag," said Al-Sheikh, 49, who practices in Okemos. "They stole artifacts, gold crosses, centuries-old paintings, just completely wrecked the church. …
"They're beheading children, cutting boys in half, raping the women" across the region, he said.
Such accounts might seem exaggerated if not for videos of beheadings and mass executions posted by ISIS.
"We have seen reports of mass killings, beheadings, abductions, forced conversions, torture, rape and sexual assault, using women and children as human shields, and people being burned or buried alive," U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Tom Malinowski told a congressional committee on Sept. 10.
Al-Sheikh didn't require State Department confirmation. His church connections reach to the Detroit area's Chaldean population and from there to Iraq.
"What they're doing now was our biggest fear growing up," he said. "They're destroying anything they don't agree with. Can you imagine somebody wiping out centuries of history?"
ISIS troops "claim to be killing in the name of God," he said. "I'd like to see what answer they're going to give God when God says, 'Who told you to kill in my name?'"
Coming to America
Al-Sheikh was 9 when his widowed mother and two older brothers fled Iraq in 1974. They might have remained, he said, but a corrupt Shiite judge had confiscated his late father's business and they were constantly harassed to convert to Islam.
Fortunately, he said, they had relatives in and around Detroit who were part of the largest concentration of Chaldean Catholics in the United States. Al-Sheikh arrived as a speaker of Arabic and Aramaic. He added English and piled up educational accomplishments, graduating from Wayne State University's School of Medicine in 1995.
He purchased an existing family clinic from a retiring physician in 1999 and relocated from Grand River Avenue to a new building on Okemos Road a few years later.
He and his wife, Sarah, an Irish-American, have a son, Maher Jr., and daughters Mary, Grace and Katherine. They worship at St. Martha Catholic Church in Okemos.
He believes ISIS leaders when they vow to bring their brand of Islamic terrorism to the United States. His worry is how war-weary Americans and President Obama will deal with the threat.
"These people have sworn to come to our land and kill us here," he said. "They are a threat to us. These guys mean what they say.
"This is not about just saving the Chaldeans or the Christians. The atrocities … can happen here. It doesn't take many to carry them out. My biggest fear is they might attack our schools and hit us where it really hurts us, our kids."
Heirs to Saddam
Al-Sheikh can connect Americans to Middle Eastern history almost as fast as you could say, "Doubting Thomas" or "Jonah in the belly of a whale."
He was born a few miles from modern Mosul, successor to ancient Nineveh. Thomas, Jesus' doubting disciple, converted people in the region to Christianity while en route to India. About eight centuries earlier, Jonah had carried out a notable religious mission in the same area.
The Bible and Koran say Jonah warned the Ninevites to change their ways or see their empire destroyed. They complied and God spared them. Eventually, a Muslim mosque was built in Mosul and served as a shrine to Jonah.
ISIS blew up the structure, which had become a pilgrimage site, on July 24. Nearby residents told the Associated Press the militants claimed the mosque had become a place that no longer honored Islam.
Al-Sheikh sees ISIS as an heir to Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator who was deposed in 2003 and executed in 2006.
As Iraq's majority Shiites came into power under the post-war, U.S. occupation of the country, Sunnis – the branch of Islam associated with Saddam — were excluded from key leadership positions.
Hell broke loose after the U.S. military pulled out and the Sunnis detected the weakness of the government in Baghdad.
"A lot of them were Ba'ath Party members and they were military," Al-Sheikh said, referring to Saddam's former political party. "They just went into hiding. They had Saddam's weapons. They just waited. When we (U.S.) left the region is when they started to come back out.
"A lot of the Sunnis took this opportunity to take revenge against the Shiites who they felt slighted them or persecuted them when they (Shiites) came into power after Saddam," Al-Sheikh said.
He describes ISIS troops as religious fanatics but says their leaders are using Islam as an excuse to grab power.
"I don't think the people in charge of ISIS are religious Muslims at all," he said. "There are a lot of Muslims around the world who don't agree with this (ISIS aggression and atrocities). They don't like what other Muslims are doing in the name of Islam because that's not their Islam."
Air strikes alone will not be enough to stop ISIS, he said.
"If there's a cancer, you have to remove it. You can't just say, 'I'm going to take a little bit out of it.'"
And if the President and a substantial number of Americans are determined to avoid putting U.S. boots on the ground in Iraq?
"There's going to have to be (ground forces) because these guys (ISIS) are not going to quit," he said. "This ideology is not going to quit."
Obama administration fact sheet: "Strategy to counter ISIS"
Tel Keppe has ties to prominent member of Hussein regime
Tel Keppe, the hometown of Okemos physician Maher Al-Sheikh, is also the hometown of Frank Kalabat, bishop of the Chaldean Church for the Eastern United States based in Detroit, and Chaldean Catholic priest Manuel Boji of Sterling Heights.
But for most Americans, the most recognizable person to come out of Tel Keppe is Tariq Aziz, who served as foreign minister, deputy prime minister and spokesman for Saddam Hussein's regime until the dictator was deposed in 2003.
Fluent in English and the only Christian in Saddam's cabinet, Aziz was frequently interviewed by U.S. news organizations before Saddam fled Baghdad in response to the U.S.-led invasion. Aziz surrendered to U.S. troops in 2003.
An Iraqi tribunal sentenced him to death in 2010 but the sentence never was carried out and he remains in prison.