Christians attend holiday Mass amid return to shattered town
BARTELLA, IRAQ — For the 300 Christians who braved r a i n a nd wi nd t o a t t e nd Chri s t mas’s Eve Mass i n 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 t wo 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 milit ants, 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.
O n S a t u r d a y, wo m e n j o y o u s l y u l u l a t e d wh e n 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 big ger than our sadness,” said universit y student Nevine Ibrahim, 20, who was in Bartella on 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.
“I d o n’ t t h i n k we c a n return. The house can be fixed but the pain inside us cannot,” she said, seated among three of her siblings. “Who will protect us?”
Halfway through the service, conducted in Assyrian and Arabic, it became something of a wartime Mass. Roughly a dozen U.S. military servicemen and a 100-man contingent from the Iraqi military led by several top generals descended on the church in a show of solidarity.
The distant thud of explosions could be heard after Ma s s . B u t n o n e o f t h a t seemed to dampen the worshippers’ joyous spirit.
The soldiers photographed each other and took selfies. Many of them held lit candles, and the congregation warmly applauded when Bishop Mussa Al-Shamani thanked the Iraqi military for “liberating” Bartella.
The Christians of Nineveh are members of an ancient and once-vibrant community. They enjoyed protection under Saddam Hussein, but their numbers rapidly dwindled after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq toppled the regime of the late dictator in 2003.
Of the estimated 1.5 million Christians who lived in Iraq on the eve of the U.S.led invasion, about 500,000 are left.