Hundreds of Iraqi Christians took part, on the evening of Monday, August 6, 2018, in a procession that took place along the streets of Karamlesh, a town of the Nineveh Plain traditionally inhabited by Christians, reported Fides News Agency.
With the community gesture, the Christians from Karamlesh wanted to commemorate the events that of August 6-7, 2014, that forced many tens of thousands of Christians to leave the towns and villages of the Nineveh Plain ahead of the offensive of the jihadist militiamen of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (Daesh).
The procession was preceded by a reflection on the pain and suffering that accompanied and followed that dramatic mass exodus, read in the light of the mystery of the cross. The Gospel passage in which Jesus promises that he will pray to the Father to ask him to send the Holy Spirit, the «Comforter» to his disciples was also read. Then the procession with the candles began, and along the way the participants recited Psalm 150, celebrating in this way also the «new beginning» represented in their lives by the return to their village and their homes, after the years of jihadist domination.
Karamlesh, with the other villages and towns of the Nineveh Plain, represented the historical landmarks of the native Christian communities of ancient Mesopotamia. It is precisely around that Plain that the project of an «autonomous region» to be assigned to Christians began, in order to achieve at least in part the ancestral dream of a «national home» reserved for the Chaldean, Assyrian and Syrian communities.
