Ever since the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS), there’s been rising alarm regarding the future for Christians in the Middle East. A Catholic priest who recently returned to his village in northern Iraq after six years in Rome described what he found as “shocking,” but doubled down on the need for Christians to survive.
With the defeat of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq, the Iraqi prime minister has called on Christians to return home to Iraq. Mustafa Al-Kazemi said, in a statement issued by the government, that Iraq was “serious about providing assistance to our Christian families and solving their problems.”
A chalice from a Catholic parish in Qaraqosh, in the Nineveh Plains of Iraq, scarred by bullets from Islamic State militants was a mute witness at a vespers service for Christian martyrs.
A new report says Christians are faring better in conflict-ravaged regions in the Middle East, but the precarious situation means the Church could vanish in places like Syria and Iraq if the Islamic State mounted another campaign in the region.
The self-declared caliphate of the Islamic State (ISIS), whose territory once spanned parts of Iraq and Syria, has been extinguished, but the group’s influence is very much alive. In Mosul, Iraq, a city that’s about 250 miles north of Baghdad, two years after the defeat of ISIS, it is still impossible for Christians to return to their homes because it remains unsafe for them.
