Some people have fled after the invasion led by the US army. Others have been killed in the sectarian bloodshed and more of it is expected followed by the jihadist attacks. The last two violent decades in Iraq have hollowed out the Christian community it has got and it dates back to two millennia.
The Christian community first settled in the very fertile plains of the Nineveh province and later on headed for Baghdad in the city’s busy boulevards. In more modern times, there are more than one million Christians who have been uprooted by consecutive conflicts in Iraq.
An Iraqi Chaldean Catholic, Sally Fawzi has said that by the time she turned 24 he has survived and lived through three wars. She has been staying in the USA in Texas after leaving her country over a decade ago.
Some members of the historic Christian community of Iraq have already escaped to the autonomous Kurdish region nearby as others have waited in neighboring country Jordan to emigrate and then resettled in faraway countries like Australia.
Too many people have lost hope long ago in their homeland but the scheduled visit by Pope Francis next month is seen as the first-ever papal trip in the country of Iraq. It is an important opportunity for the Pope who can use his voice and garner great international support of their faith for the Iraqis.
The Christian community in Iraq is one of the most diverse and oldest in the world featuring Armenian Orthodox, Chaldean, Protestant, and also other branches of Christianity.
When the dictator Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003, there have been 1.5 million Christians in Iraq is a country that has 25 million people.
But as the population of Iraq has mushroomed, there was a shrink in the percentage of minorities.
Today, there are only 400,000 Christians that have remained in Iraq as the predominantly Muslim country has got a population of more than 40 million people, according to reports by the co-founder of the Hammurabi Human rights Organization, William Warda.
Nearly half a million Christians who left Iraq settled in the USA and the rest of them were dispersed in countries like Norway, Australia, Canada, and other parts of Europe.
Rana is 40 and she tried her best to stay in the country. Her uncle and aunt have been killed in 2007 as the US soldiers opened fire blindly on many of the streets in Mosul after there has been an attack on the regional capital in Nineveh, the Northern Province.
She remained in the city with her 41-year-old husband, Ammar al-Kass who is a veterinarian.
The next year, Iraq has been gripped by a string of assassinations, sectarian bloodletting, that also included Christians and it has forced the Kass family and pushed them to move out to the relatively safer Kurdistan in Iraq.
But the region has become quite unstable for Iraqi Christians in 2013.
