ICC Note:
As displaced Christians begin returning to their home villages, recently liberated from ISIS, many are discovering the lives they once lived have been utterly destroyed. After over two years of ISIS occupation, much of once was has been completely destroyed. Churches, Christian homes, businesses, gone. Having lived for over the past two years in IDP camps across northern Iraq, this most recent blow to the Christian community has fallen particularly hard. Will Iraqi Christians attempt to rebuild their lives destroyed by ISIS or are they destine to leave the country altogether? 
01/04/2017 Iraq (Crux Now) – As villages on Iraq’s Nineveh Plain are liberated from Islamic State forces, the Christians who lived there have returned, only to find destruction and betrayal.
“(When) we went to see what happened to our hometowns, we could not believe the hatred and the revenge that ISIS has against us,” said Sister Diana Momeka, a nun with the Dominican Sisters of Saint Catherine of Siena who ministers to those displaced by ISIS.
Diana had taught at St. Ephrem Seminary in Bakhdida, Iraq before ISIS invaded in the summer of 2014 and drove out the region’s Christians. The destruction, she told CNA, was “beyond imagination.”
After ISIS took over much of Northern Iraq in 2014, tens of thousands of refugees fled eastward into Iraqi Kurdistan. Many have been living in temporary housing unfit for the winter season, relying upon aid groups for their basic needs.
Some of the Christians came from the Nineveh Plain, which lies between the city of Mosul – Iraq’s second-largest city and the current site of conflict between ISIS occupiers and coalition forces fighting to retake it – to the west and Iraqi Kurdistan to the east.
Recently, towns on the Nineveh Plain were liberated from ISIS control by a military coalition that included local militia. Christians who had been living in temporary shelters headed back home with joyful hearts, Diana said.
But what they saw when they arrived home broke their hearts. Evidence of ISIS’s hatred and revenge was everywhere in the destruction of their homes. Graffiti on the walls of churches made threats like “we’re going to break your crosses” and “you have no place with us.”
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