Pope Francis begins, Friday March 5, a historic visit to Iraq, the first for a sovereign pontiff, under very high protection and despite the pandemic, in a country which is home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, devastated by conflicts and persecutions.

Catholic Church leader who said he would make first-ever papal visit to Iraq as a "pilgrim of peace" will also reach out to Shia Muslims, meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the highest authority for many Shiites in Iraq and around the world.

During this four-day visit to several cities in the country, the Pope should often be alone on the roads ... rebuilt for the occasion, due to total containment decreed in this country where the number of contaminations has beaten this week a record since the start of the Covid-19 epidemic, with more than 5,000 cases per day.

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Pope Francis in Iraq: a "crucial" visit after "30 years of descent into hell"

Pope Francis, who said he was "in a cage" in recent months in the Vatican idling with the Covid-19, will begin an armored car trip without crowds, "virtual" for the Iraqis who will follow him on television and mainly by air for the Pope, whose helicopter or plane will sometimes fly over areas where jihadists from the Islamic State organization (OEI) are still hiding.

Its stages in the four corners of the country will bring together only a few hundred people, with the exception of a Sunday mass in a stadium in Erbil in Kurdistan, in the presence of several thousand faithful who have reserved their places in advance.

The papal program is ambitious.

Baghdad, Najaf, Ur, Erbil, Mosul, Qaraqosh: from Friday to Monday, it will travel 1,445 kilometers in a country still struck Wednesday by deadly rocket fire, the latest episode of Iranian-American tensions still latent in Iraq. 

"Leave everything, except his faith"

This first trip abroad in fifteen months will allow the Bishop of Rome to meet a small community of the faithful on the "peripheries" of the planet, by far what he prefers.

For Saad, a Christian in Mosul, a city still under reconstruction after the anti-OEI war, this trip comes at the right time in this country which has seen its poverty rate double to 40% of the population in 2020. "We hope that the Pope will explain to the government that he must help his people, "he told AFP.

As always, François will begin Friday with a speech to the Iraqi leaders.

Beyond the security or economic difficulties that the 40 million Iraqis suffer head on, they will surely evoke the additional trauma of Christians.

When in 2014, the OEI took the Nineveh Plain, a Christian stronghold in the north, tens of thousands of inhabitants fled and few now trust the police who then abandoned them, they say.

"Some had a few minutes to decide whether they wanted to leave or be beheaded," recalls Father Karam Qacha.

"We had to leave everything, except our faith", sums up this Chaldean priest in Nineveh, denouncing the little help from the government to Christians to recover their houses or their lands, often monopolized by militiamen - sometimes Christians themselves - or relatives of politicians.

Outstretched hand to the Shiites

But, laments Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, who heads the "Congregation for Oriental Churches" in the Vatican and accompanies the Pope, "a Middle East without Christians is a Middle East that has flour, but not the leaven or salt ".

This is why, he says, Pope Francis will not fail to call them to stay or to return to Iraq, where they number 400,000, against 1.5 million twenty years ago.

A call to return "compulsory", but "difficult", agrees Cardinal Sandri, so Iraq has been for forty years of war in political or economic crisis.

According to the "Aid to the Church in Need" foundation, only 36,000 of the 102,000 Christians who left Nineveh have returned.

And among them, a third say they plan to leave the country by 2024 for fear of militias and because of unemployment, corruption and discrimination.

On Saturday and for the first time in history, the Pope will be received in the holy city of Najaf (south) by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani himself, a frail 90-year-old man who has never appeared in public.

The Pope will also participate in a prayer in Ur, birthplace of Abraham in the tribal and rural south, with Shiite, Sunni, Yazidi and Sabaean dignitaries.

With AFP

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