Displaced Iraq Christians in frontline prayer for return

August 07, 2015 00:08

Christian clerics prayed in the ruins of a monastery not far from jihadist positions in northern Iraq today to mark a year since the exodus of Iraq's

Christians from nearby ancestral lands.

"We want the good people to hear our prayers from this place so they hurry and liberate our areas as quickly as possible," Yohanna Boutros Moshe, the Syrian Catholic Archbishop of Mosul, told AFP.

Moshe led a small group of clerics in prayer in the hilltop ruins of a 4th century monastery that lies in a position of Kurdish peshmerga forces.

On June 9 last year, the Islamic State group launched a massive offensive that forced hundreds of thousands to flee.

The following day, the jihadist group seized of Mosul, the country's second city, which was home to significant community of Christians.

Many were forced from their homes two months later, when IS expanded further by attacking Kurdish-held positions, including the Nineveh plain.

The region stretches from Mosul towards Arbil, the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region, and was home to the bulk of Iraq's Christian community, one of the world's oldest.

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