Iraqi priest says Christians unlikely to return to Mosul even after the defeat of ISIS

An Iraqi priest who recently visited Mosul has stated that Christian residents are unlikely to return even if the Islamic State is completely driven out of the city.

The eastern part of Mosul was recently liberated from ISIS, but Fr. Emanuel Youkhana, a priest or archimandrite of the Assyrian Church of the East, doubts that Christians would want to return to the city.

"I don't see a future for Christians in Mosul," said Youkhana, who runs Christian Aid Program Northern Iraq, which supports displaced Iraqis around the city of Dohuk.

The priest entered the city with a military convoy on Jan. 27, the same day when Iraqi officials raised the national flag over the eastern part of the city.

Upon his arrival, Youkhana visited two heavily damaged churches and talked with the residents and soldiers. He noted that ISIS had converted the churches into warehouses.

"They used the churches to store what they looted from Christian and Yezidi villages, but as the end neared they sold the buildings to local contractors, who started tearing down the walls to reuse the steel inside," said Youkhana, as reported by Catholic News Service.

"If the army hadn't entered for another couple of weeks, the buildings might have been completely destroyed," he continued.

One building, which belongs to the Syriac Orthodox Church, had been painted with an Islamist slogan by ISIS. A military commander offered to paint over the graffiti but Youkhana said that he had no authority as it was not his church. He added that leaving the slogan would preserve the evidence of what ISIS did to the city.

Youkhana, who attended high school in Mosul, took pictures of several houses that once belonged to Christians but had been given or sold to Muslims by ISIS. Although he doubts that Christians would return to the city, he believes that they can recover the value of their properties.

"Christians aren't going to come back to stay. The churches I saw were not destroyed with bombs, but by the everyday business operations of the community. How can Christians return to that environment?" the priest remarked.

Meanwhile, a leading researcher from London has warned that "there is no such thing as a post-IS world."

Charlie Winter, senior research fellow at the International Centre for Radicalisation Studies at King's College, said that ideological measures must be taken after achieving military victory to address ongoing levels of sympathy for ISIS and its supremacist aims.

He said that the Shia-led Iraqi Government must show that they care about the people who lived under ISIS occupation and rebuild what was lost in order to convince the non-Muslim communities to return to the city.