The church ceiling was still scorched and some cherished relics missing, but after five years of war and exile, their tormentors were finally gone.
When the men and women of Iraq’s oldest Christian town gathered for Easter mass this weekend, they did so knowing that the Islamic State extremists who had chased them away were not coming back. Their battlefield defeat two months ago meant the people of Hamdaniya (also called Qaraqosh) could once again celebrate without fear.
A large congregation shuffled into pews that only two years ago lay in splintered ruin, both in the Church of the Immaculate Conception and every other church in Hamdaniya, which, like much of the rest of northern Iraq, had been overrun by extremists from Isis.
A priest in bright red robes holding a gold crosier in one hand and a small cross in the other spoke in Syriac only blocks away from where militants plotted chaos and even genocide for vulnerable communities. » | Martin Chulov in Hamdaniya | Sunday, April 21, 2019
