Iraqi Christians head home for ‘wartime’ Christmas

Displaced residents shocked by sight of shelled hometown.

BARTELLA, IRAQ — For the 300 Christians who braved rain and wind to attend Christmas’s Eve Mass in their hometown, the ceremony evoked both holiday cheer and grim reminders of the war raging around their northern Iraqi town, and the distant prospect of moving back home.

Displaced when the Islamic State group seized their town, Bartella, in August 2014, the Christians were bused into town from Irbil, capital of the self-ruled Kurdish region where they have lived for more than two years, to attend the lunchtime service in the Assyrian Orthodox church of Mart Shmoni.

Church-supervised volunteers recently cleaned the church, which had been torched by Islamic State militants, after government forces retook Bartella as part of an ongoing campaign to liberate the nearby city of Mosul and surrounding areas in Nineveh province. But the church is still missing its icons, electrical wiring hangs perilously from its ceiling and most light fixtures are gone. The headless statue of a late patriarch stands in the front yard, its pedestal surrounded by shards of glass.

On Saturday, women joyously ululated when they stepped into the marble-walled church. Almost everyone held a lit candle. Many took photos with their mobile phones. A handful of gas heaters were brought in, but they did little to warm the place on a wet and windy December day.

For many of them, the sight of their hometown in almost complete ruin was shocking.

Only a few homes in the once vibrant town of some 25,000 people stand unscathed. Most have been damaged by shelling or blackened by fire.

On one street wall, The Islamic State’s black banner remains visible under the white paint. Next to it, someone wrote: “Christ is the light of the world. Bartella is Christian.”

“Our joy is bigger than our sadness,” said university student Nevine Ibrahim, 20, who was in Bartella Saturday for the first time since she, her parents and four siblings left in 2014. They found their house badly damaged. Everything they owned was gone.