Pope Francis continues his historic journey to Iraq. This Sunday, March 7, the sovereign pontiff went to Mosul, “capital of the caliphate” of the terrorist group Islamic State. He saw the ruins of churches destroyed by the jihadists. In total, 14 churches in the province of Nineveh (north) of which Mosul is the capital, were destroyed, seven of which date back to the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries and it was therefore necessary to build a stage to welcome the Pope in the ruins of four churches of different denominations, including al-Tahira Church in Mosul, which is over 1,000 years old. It is from there that the Pope addressed a small crowd under the ululations and the cries of “Viva papa”.
Under very high protection, Francis returned to the fate of the Christian community in Iraq, one of the oldest in the world, but also one of those who experienced the most exile. “The tragic decrease in the followers of Christ, here and throughout the Middle East, is an incalculable damage, not only to the individuals and communities concerned, but to the society itself which they are leaving behind”, a- he launched.
Sunday is the day when bodyguards and law enforcement will be most alert. Because if the visit of the Pope is historic, the security system deployed to welcome it is just as important. The few kilometers that the Pope traveled by road were in armored cars. For the majority of the 1,445 km of his route started on Friday, the Sovereign Pontiff is in a plane or helicopter to fly over rather than cross areas where clandestine jihadist cells are still hiding.
Do not go to war in the name of God
And all this, in the midst of total confinement decreed until the end of his visit on Monday morning, in the face of Covid-19 contaminations which are reaching records in Iraq. But beyond the observations on the state of decay of the country and the temptation of exile, the Christians who for weeks have restored and polished churches destroyed or burnt by IS want to see in this papal visit a message of hope. “Pope Francis arrives in his white coat to announce to the whole world that we are a people of peace, of civilization, of love,” said Boutros Chito, a Catholic priest in Mosul who is putting the finishing touches on the decorations of the church. -Tahira of Qaraqosh, near Mosul.
This Christian town with a thousand-year-old history is the next stop for the 84-year-old Argentine pope. There, he will meet the faithful who still hesitate to return definitively to their villages. When in 2014, ISIS took the Nineveh Plain, tens of thousands of Christians fled and few now trust law enforcement agencies who then abandoned them, they say. Today, many say they live in fear of the former paramilitaries now integrated into the state who have taken over the ground from IS.
The words said to the Pope on Saturday by Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a great figure of Shiism in Iraq and beyond, ensuring to work so that the Christians of Iraq live in “peace”, in “security” and with “all their constitutional rights “, Could reassure some. Again, in his prayer on Sunday, he hammered: “it is not permissible for us to kill our brothers (in) the name” of God, “it is not permissible for us to make war in his name”. After meetings with Christians from Mosul and Qaraqosh (who have already offered him a stole he wore in Baghdad), the Pope will celebrate an afternoon mass in a stadium in Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan in the North, in front of thousands of faithful.
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