Pope Francis visited Iraq”s war-ravaged north on Sunday, travelling to areas that were heavily damaged by Islamic State extremists.
The 84-year-old pontiff will pray for Iraqi war victims in areas where Iraq’s Christian minority fled the militants as part of the last day of the first-ever papal visit to the country.
Francis is visiting Iraq to encourage Christians communities to stay despite years of war and persecution.
On Saturday, he met with a powerful Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who said that Iraqi Christians should be able to live in peace.
Francis also held a landmark inter religious gathering, giving a message of peaceful coexistence to communities.
On Sunday, Francis will travel to the northern city of Mosul, which was widely damaged in the war against IS, to pray for Iraq’s war victims.
The setting will be a city square surrounded by the remnants of four damaged churches belonging to some of Iraq’s myriad Christian denominations.
The Islamic State overran the city in 2014 and declared a caliphate from northern Syria through Iraq’s north and west. The city held a deep symbolic importance for the group but was liberated in July 2017 after a nine-month battle.
Pope Francis will travel by helicopter across the Nineveh plains to the small Christian community of Qaraqosh, where only a fraction of families have returned after fleeing the IS onslaught in 2014.
He will pray in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, which was torched by IS and restored in recent years.
At the end of his final day, he will hold mass in a stadium in Irbil, a city in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region. Thousands are expected to attend despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
Iraq declared victory over IS in 2017, and while the extremist group no longer controls any territory it still carries out sporadic attacks, especially in the north. The brutal three-year rule left behind lots of destruction.
The Christian minority was hit especially hard, with thousands fleeing the country, leaving behind homes and churches destroyed by extremists.
Francis hopes to deliver a message of hope, one underscored by the historic nature of the visit and the fact that it is his first international trip since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
