Shafaqna English- Around 300 Iraqi Christians in Mosul attended the first mass in a recently-restored Chaldean Catholic Church, years after Daesh turned it into a police office.
“I’ve been waiting for this day,” 74-year-old former school director Ilham Abdullah said. “We hope that Christian families will come back and life will return to what it used to be” in Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province, home to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.
Mosul, Iraq’s second city, has historically been among the Arab world’s most culturally diverse cities — a place of mosques, churches, shrines and tombs.
“I feel like I have been brought back to life,” said Abdel Masih Selim, a 75-year-old retired banker, who fled the rule of Daesh in Mosul, settling in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region.
The 80-year-old church of Um al-Mauna has restored its former design, with its two red-painted domes carrying large crucifixes, and a renovated bell tower.
In its courtyard, photos show the state of the building after it was saved from IS, and others illustrated the restoration process
Source: Iraqi News