The situation for these communities is particularly dire. Iraqi Christians numbered more than 1.5 million before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and, by 2017, their numbers had fallen to fewer than 250,000 because of sectarianism and genocide.
It was a little over five years ago when ISIS targeted Iraq’s Christian heartland of the Nineveh Plains and the Yazidi bastion of Sinjar. ISIS killed many of these people, or sold them at sex slave markers, burned villages and crops, and desecrated and destroyed holy sites to erase these communities from the face of the earth. As a consequence, Christian and Yazidi communities there are weakened and divided, an effect of longstanding persecution and genocide.
The Tablet March 4, 2021
Father Ammar Altony Yako celebrates Mass at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Qaraqosh, Iraq, Feb. 23, 2021. Pope Francis plans to Qaraqosh March 7 during his March 5-8 trip to Iraq. (Photo: CNS/Thaier al-Sudani, Reuters)
By John L. Aleen
ROME (Crux) – Tomorrow Pope Francis leaves for Iraq, and in most of the Christian world it’ll be seen as a trip to honor the memory of a martyred Christian population that suffered unimaginable horrors under an ISIS occupation of the Nineveh Plains region of the country between 2014 and 2017.
For Muslims, however, it’ll be seen more as a gesture of outreach to the Shi’a branch of Islam, especially on March 6 when the pontiff is scheduled to travel to Najaf to meet Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, widely considered the most authoritative leader for Shi’ite Muslims. The Shi’ites represent somewhere between 10 to 15 percent of the Islamic world, roughly 200 million believers, concentrated in the
In less than two decades, Iraq’s Christian community
shrunk from more than 1.5 million to a few hundred thousand. War, bloodshed, persecution ands economic stagnation forced most of the community to seek a new future abroad.
On Friday, Pope Francis plans to shine a light on one of the most diverse and longstanding Christian communities in the world as he embarks on a historic pilgrimage across the country.
Iraq, a Muslim majority country of just more than 40 million, has 14 registered Christian sects from a range of churches, but Chaldeans and other Catholic denominations make up about half of the 400,000-strong community. Armenian Orthodox and Protestant make up a sizeable proportion
Still bearing the cross
The country is rebuilding churches, but will anyone fill the pews?
T
HINGS ARE moving quickly in Qaraqosh, a sleepy Christian town just outside Mosul in northern Iraq. Pope Francis arrives on March 7th, four years after Islamic State (
IS) was chased out. So local priests have been hurriedly cleaning up al-Tahira, their cathedral and one of Iraq’s largest churches. They have refurbished its burnt interior and repaired most of the masonry that the jihadists used for target practice. When your correspondent visited, five days before the pope, smashed chandeliers and a golden crucifix torn down by
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