A year after the historic visit of Pope Francis to Iraq, more than 25,000 Assyrian Christians in Qaraqosh chanted “Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, Hosanna.”
Qaraqosh, a majority-Christian Assyrian town located at the heart of the Nineveh Plains in northern Iraq, is less than 20 miles southeast of Mosul, the city that in 2014 was the de facto capital of the Islamic State (ISIS) in the region.
After the second U.S. invasion in 2004 and the ISIS uprising in 2014, only about 300,000 Christians remained since Mosul, Qaraqosh, and other towns in the Nineveh Plains were the home of approximately 1.5 million Christians in northern Iraq.
His Beatitude Ignatius Ephrem Joseph III Yonan and Patriarch of Antioch and all the East for the Syriac Catholic Church presided the Mass on Palm Sunday in Iraq.
Accompanying them were Archbishop Mitja Lescovar, the apostolic nuncio to Iraq; Bishop Nathanael Nizar Samaan, metropolitan of the Syriac diocese of Hydiab-Erbil and the rest of the Kurdistan Region; Archbishop Ephrem Youssef Abba Mansour, of the Syriac Diocese of Baghdad, and Bishop Atanasius Firas Mundher Dardar, patriarchal vicar for the Syriac Catholics in Basra (Basorah) and the Arabian Gulf.
The procession around the town set off from the Great Church of St. Mary at Al-Tahira, the largest church building of the Syriac Catholic Church, and the largest church in Iraq since its consecration in 1952. The church was desecrated and burned by ISIS, but thanks to the help of Catholic organizations in the West, such as Aid to the Church in Need, it was restored in time for Pope Francis’ visit in March 2021.