Christians hope pope visit will boost community
Nasser Banyameen speaks about his hometown of Qaraqosh in the historical heartland of Iraqi Christianity with nostalgia. Before Islamic State fighters swept through the Nineveh Plains in northern Iraq. Before the militants shattered his sense of peace. Before panicked relatives and neighbors fled, some never to return.
Iraq’s Christian communities in the area were dealt a severe blow when they were scattered by the Islamic State onslaught in 2014, further shrinking the country’s already dwindling Christian population. Many hope their struggle to endure will get a boost from a historic March 58 visit by Pope Francis.
Among the places on his itinerary is Qaraqosh, where this week Vatican and Iraqi flags fluttered from light poles, some adorned with the pope’s image.
Francis’ visit, his first foreign trip since the coronavirus pandemic and the first ever by a pope to Iraq, is a sign that “You’re not alone,” said Monsignor Segundo Tejado Munoz, undersecretary of the Vatican’s development office. “There’s someone who is thinking of you, who is with you. And these signs are so important. So important.”
The Islamic State juggernaut and the long war to drive the militants out left ransacked homes and charred or pulverized buildings around the north. But the biggest loss perhaps has been the people. Traditionally Christian towns across the Nineveh Plains virtually emptied out and, by some of the widely varying estimates, fewer than half of the Christians who fled have returned.
The Vatican and the pope have frequently insisted on the need to preserve Iraq’s ancient Christian communities and create the security, economic and social conditions for those who have left to return.
Many Christians who fled the Islamic State advance have either stayed in Iraq’s Kurdistan region or started new lives abroad. While those who have returned have been rebuilding fractured but vibrant communities with resolve, some still feel vulnerable and eye better lives elsewhere.
Banyameen returned in 2019 from the Kurdish region to his house in Qaraqosh, also known as Bakhdida. But many family members who fled like him ended up in Australia and Germany. Islamic State sleeper cells still carry out attacks in parts of Iraq, so he worries about the specter of a militant resurgence, the future of his three children and Iraq’s economic and security woes.
“The homeland is the family, not the house … I feel very homesick,” he said.
The Chaldean Catholic Patriarch, Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako, estimated that 1 million Christians have left Iraq since 2003 and about 500,000 remained. But there are no official figures, and estimates vary: Some put the number left at fewer than 250,000.