Pope Francis embarked on a historic visit to Iraq on Friday, the first with a pontiff to the birthplace of Eastern churches from which more than a million Christians have fled over the past 20 years.
The papal visit has symbolic value because of the importance of Iraqi Christians in the history of religion and the cultural and linguistic heritage going back to the time of ancient Babylon, nearly 4,000 years ago.
The systematic persecution of Iraqi Christians at the hands of al-Qaeda and then ISIL (ISIS) in recent years has pushed tens of thousands to leave and threatened the survival of the community.
Francis met with the declining Christian communities in Baghdad, Mosul and Qaraqosh, Iraq’s largest Christian city in the Nineveh Plains, where, in 2014, the ISIL armed group destroyed the remnants of the presence. Christians who survived through brutal al-Qaeda campaigns, causing tens of thousands to flee and find shelter in the Kurdish autonomous region of northern Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.
In Erbil, the pope met with Kurdish authorities and some of the 150,000 Christian refugees from central Iraq.
Pope Francis prays for “victims of war” outside an ancient ruin in Mosul Iraq, where ISIL raided one of the world’s oldest Christian communities until its loss three years ago .
With partially collapsed walls in the Al-Tahera Church (Uncontrolled Judgment) centuries ago, Pope Francis appealed for Christians in Iraq and the Middle East to remain in their homes.
The pope, who started in 2019 a new phase of interfaith communication between the Church of Rome and Islam, also visited Najaf to meet Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the highest Shia authority in Muslim-occupied Iraq Shia represents about 70 percent of the total population.