IRAQ: A Little Hope in Mosul

Source: Preemptive Love Coalition, February 19, 2017

A devout Muslim, Waleed worked for years as a soldier with Special Forces, and he has the sorrow and stories to prove it. He is more than qualified to work as a security specialist on our front-line deliveries. But now, standing there with that big grin on his scarred face, he looked more like a little kid.

How can he be smiling? We’re in a bombed-out church in the heart of Mosul, where ISIS had painted a giant black flag on the cross out front. Where thousands of Christian homes were marked with the Arabic letter “N,” their lives threatened with the sword, their possessions looted [and] families ultimately driven out of their ancestral neighborhoods like cattle.

Already that day, we’d picked through airstrike wreckage, seen rotted bodies of ISIS fighters, heard and felt and seen the battles of this god-forsaken war, heard stories of untold suffering—and now, standing in this bombed out, burned-up church, Waleed had the nerve to grin at the destruction?

“See? Look up… they missed it.”

» Read full story and/or watch the two-minute video.

» See also Mass Christian Immigration from Iraq Makes Future of Church Uncertain (Voice of America), and read about Burmese Christians ministering in Mosul (Christianity Today).

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