QARAQOSH, Iraq: It wasn’t Santa on a sleigh, but it was close: just before dusk on Christmas Eve, a busload of volunteers pulled into the Iraqi Christian town of Qaraqosh to deliver holiday happiness.
Under a pinkish sky, they disembarked from their charter bus with cardboard boxes full of Christmas cards, bearing hand-written messages from across Iraq.
“A special greeting to our Christian brothers,” read one card, signed in the overwhelmingly Muslim southern port city of Basra the previous day.
On foot, members of Iraq’s Tahawer (Dialogue) initiative and other volunteers delivered some 1,400 cards across the northern town, which was ravaged by militant rule after the IS group advanced east across the Nineveh Plains in 2014.
“It’s a beautiful initiative,” said Rand Khaled, after receiving a Christmas card outside the Syriac Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception in Qaraqosh.
She was dressed in her Christmas Eve finest, with a chic chocolate-coloured coat shielding her from the cold.
“We need initiatives like this every once in a while, because people who don’t know these areas absolutely should get to know them,” Ranad said.
Iraq’s Christians number around 400,000 today, down from some 1.5 million before the US-led invasion toppled longtime dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003.
It is a tiny minority in a country of 40 million people. The cards came from all over Iraq: from the capital Baghdad and the city of Najaf, from Salahaddin province in the west and the Kurdish city of Dohuk in the far north.
They were packed into dozens of boxes and transported up to 950 kilometres through military checkpoints before reaching Qaraqosh.
“I don’t know how to describe it,” said Nishwan Mohammad, Tahawer’s programme manager.
— AFP
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