For the 300 Christians who braved wind and rain to attend Christmas’s Eve Mass in their hometown, the ceremony evoked both holiday cheer and grim reminders of the war raging around their northern Iraqi town, and the distant prospect of moving back home.

Displaced when Daesh seized their town, Bartella, in August 2014, the Christians were bused into town from Arbil, capital of the self-ruled Kurdish region where they have lived for more than two years, to attend the lunchtime service in the Assyrian Orthodox church of Mart Shmoni.

The headless statue of a late patriarch stands in the front yard, its pedestal surrounded by shards of glass.

On Saturday, women joyously ululated when they stepped into the marble-walled church.For many of them, the sight of their hometown in almost complete ruin was shocking. Only a few homes in the once vibrant town of some 25,000 people stand unscathed. Most have been damaged by shelling or blackened by fire.

On one street wall, Daesh’s black banner remains visible under the white paint. Next to it, someone wrote: “Christ is the light of the world. Bartella is Christian.”

“Our joy is bigger than our sadness,” said university student Nevine Ebrahim, 20, who was in Bartella Saturday for the first time since she, her parents and four siblings left in 2014. They found their house badly damaged. Everything they owned was gone.

“I don’t think we can return. The house can be fixed but the pain inside us cannot,” she said, seated among three of her siblings. “Who will protect us?”

Halfway through the service, conducted in Assyrian and Arabic, roughly a dozen US military servicemen and a 100-man contingent from the Iraqi military descended on the church. The soldiers photographed each other and took selfies.

The Christians of Nineveh are members of an ancient and once-vibrant community. They enjoyed protection under Saddam Hussain, but their numbers rapidly dwindled after the US-led invasion of Iraq toppled the regime of the late dictator in 2003.

Since 2003, militants have targeted Christians and their churches, terrorising the community and forcing many of its members to flee to the West, neighboring nations or the northern Kurdish region. Daesh’s onslaught across northern Iraq in 2014 devastated the unique communities of Christian-majority towns like Karamlis, Bartella and Qaraqosh - all in the Nineveh plains.

Of the estimated 1.5 million Christians who lived in Iraq on the eve of the US-led invasion, about 500,000 are left.

source: GULF NEWS