Sako visits Nineveh villages freed from Islamic State

The Chaldean Catholic Patriarch has visited Christian villages of the Nineveh Plain that were reclaimed last week during a military offensive aimed at reconquering the Iraqi city of Mosul from Islamic State, writes Ellen Teague.

Patriarch Louis Raphael I Sako described the military successes of the Iraqi army and Kurdish militia as “very important” and to be welcomed “with joy and trepidation” by the Iraqi Christian community. He hoped for “the complete liberation of Mosul and all the plain of Nineveh”.

Patriarch Sako paid a 12-hour visit to six villages, travelling 125 miles around Mosul, on 27 October. He called the destruction carried out by Islamic State in the course of their liberation a source of  “sadness and suffering”, but also felt “great hope”, with the likely return of the mostly Christian community. In some ruined churches bells rang out for the first time in two years. The evening before the visit he celebrated an ecumenical prayer service in Erbil “for peace and liberation” of the Nineveh plain.

Attended by displaced people, it was held in the church of Mary Mother of Perpetual Help in the Erbil suburb of Ankawa. A proposal was launched to declare 2017 as the “Year of Peace” in Iraq to promote national reconciliation and avoid the danger of further wars and divisions. Patriarch Sako told Iraqi Christians “it is important not to emigrate but remain here in our land”.

Last Sunday, as the battle for the city of Mosul continued, Syriac Catholic Archbishop Youhanna Boutros Moshe of Mosul celebrated Mass in Qaraqosh for the first time in two years, in the burnt-out Church of the Immaculate Conception.

“Our role today is to remove all the remnants of Daesh [Islamic State],” said the archbishop who was born in Qaraqosh, “and this includes erasing sedition, separation and conflicts, which victimise us.”