BAGHDAD (AP) — A prominent Iraqi Christian religious leader who left Baghdad amid a political dispute last year returned to the capital this week at the invitation of the country’s prime minister after nine months of self-imposed exile in northern Iraq’s Kurdish region.Louis Sako was welcomed warmly by a church packed with members of the country’s Christian minority as he led his first mass in Baghdad on Friday after returning the day before.
Sako had withdrawn from his headquarters in Baghdad to the Kurdish regional capital, Irbil, last July after Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid revoked a decree recognizing his position as patriarch of the Chaldeans, Iraq’s largest Christian denomination and one of the Catholic Church’s eastern rites.
The Iraqi president downplayed his revocation of Sako’s recognition as bureaucratic housekeeping, claiming it did not diminish the patriarch’s legal or religious status, but Sako called it an affront to the church and said he would not return to Baghdad until his recognition was reinstated.
His departure added to the feeling of helplessness among many Iraqi Christians, who often feel politically sidelined and who had been targeted violently first by al-Qaida and then by the Islamic State militant group. A 2021 visit by Pope Francis provided a glimmer of hope that quickly faded. Many of the Christian villages destroyed as IS rampaged across the country remain in ruins, their former inhabitants scattered.
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Sako had withdrawn from his headquarters in Baghdad to the Kurdish regional capital, Irbil, last July after Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid revoked a decree recognizing his position as patriarch of the Chaldeans, Iraq’s largest Christian denomination and one of the Catholic Church’s eastern rites.
The Iraqi president downplayed his revocation of Sako’s recognition as bureaucratic housekeeping, claiming it did not diminish the patriarch’s legal or religious status, but Sako called it an affront to the church and said he would not return to Baghdad until his recognition was reinstated.
His departure added to the feeling of helplessness among many Iraqi Christians, who often feel politically sidelined and who had been targeted violently first by al-Qaida and then by the Islamic State militant group. A 2021 visit by Pope Francis provided a glimmer of hope that quickly faded. Many of the Christian villages destroyed as IS rampaged across the country remain in ruins, their former inhabitants scattered.
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