Iraq’s Christian population has shrunk to fewer than 400,000 from around 1.5 million before the US-led invasion of 2003 that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein. The ISIS onslaught forced hundreds of thousands of Christians in Nineveh province surrounding Mosul to flee.

He told AFP that the terrorists destroyed 70 percent of the monastery the year after they occupied Mosul in 2014 and declared the establishment of an Islamic “caliphate.”

The US Department of State funded the project, which also had support from a Christian non-governmental group, L’Oeuvre d’Orient, according to Samer Yohanna, a superior of the Antonian order of Chaldean monks. “Each Friday, Mosul’s Christian families would come here.” “My son and daughter were baptized here,” he said. “We have old memories in this monastery,” said Maan Bassem Ajjaj, 53, a civil servant who moved to Arbil, capital of the neighboring autonomous region of Kurdistan, to escape the terrorists. Mosul was left in ruins after three years of ISIS occupation which ended in 2017 when an Iraqi force backed by US-led coalition air strikes pushed them out. It is the latest sign of a slow return to normality in Iraq’s second city. For all the latest headlines, follow our Google News channel online or via the app.

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