In a broken place, a miraculous discovery — 'Even when it is hated, defaced and attacked, the cross will rise, like Christ, unbroken.'
As I returned to England after a few days in Iraq, it is the sound of broken glass and rubble, crunching underfoot in one of the many destroyed churches, that lingers in my mind. Just a few weeks ago, on my fourth visit to that beleaguered Christian community since the genocide began in the summer of 2014, I was taken, along with Catholic journalist Edward Pentin, to visit the Christian towns on the Nineveh Plains, liberated from ISIS.
It is easy to use the phrase “ghost towns,” yet in the case of Karemlash it is not only a phrase but a reality. Before ISIS swept into the area, in August 2014, Karemlash had been a mainly Chaldean Christian town of nearly 10,000 residents.
The monastery of St. Barbara, formerly a place of pilgrimage for many Iraqi Christians, is at the entrance to the town. We were accompanied by Fr. Thabet, the parish priest. He showed us the ruined home of his parents and grandparents, bombed by coalition forces because it was used as an ISIS outpost. Sitting in what had been the family garden was a large bomb.