After almost a decade of death and destruction, and one year after the historic visit of Pope Francis to Iraq, more than 25,000 Assyrian Christians in Qaraqosh, on the Nineveh Plains of Northern Iraq, gathered to celebrate Holy Week. Nineveh is mentioned in the Old Testament and has one of the oldest Christian communities in the world.

The majority-Christian Assyrian town 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.

Two decades ago, the towns of the Nineveh Plains were the home of approximately 1.5 million Christians in northern Iraq. After the second U.S. invasion in 2004 and the ISIS uprising in 2014, only about 300,000 Christians remained.

But on Palm Sunday, April 10, the town became the Christian epicenter of Iraq during a procession and a Mass presided by His Beatitude Ignatius Ephrem Joseph III Yonan and Patriarch of Antioch and all the East for the Syriac Catholic Church.