POPE TO VISIT IRAQ IN MARCH, FIRST FOREIGN TRIP SINCE COVID PANDEMIC

Mon 07 December 2020:

Pope Francis will break a 15-month hiatus from international travel to visit Iraq in March.

The 83-year-old has long spoken of his desire to visit the Middle Eastern country, although the Vatican said the programme would “take into consideration the evolution of the worldwide health emergency”.

Francis will be the first head of the Roman Catholic Church to visit Iraq, where the number of Christians has dropped dramatically over the past two decades.

“He will visit Baghdad, the plain of Ur… the city of Erbil, as well as Mosul and Qaraqosh in the plain of Nineveh,” spokesman Matteo Bruni said in a statement, during a trip planned from March 5 to 8, 2021.

There were more than one million Christians in Iraq but just a few hundred thousand are left following sectarian warfare after the 2003 US-led invasion and the Islamic State group’s sweep through a third of the country in 2014.

The pope’s visit to Mosul will be particularly significant, given that it was a former stronghold of the Islamic State group.

Francis was forced to cancel all foreign trips in June after it became clear that coronavirus, which hit Italy in early March, would make travel for the elderly pontiff too dangerous.

A few hundred thousand Christians are left in Iraq following sectarian warfare after the 2003 US-led invasion and the Islamic State group’s sweep through a third of the country in 2014.

The Iraq foreign ministry said the March visit “symbolises a message of peace to Iraq and the whole region”.