For Iraqi Christians, the Road to Reconstruction Is Long

The number of Christians in Iraq has plunged from perhaps 1.3m before the 2003 war to barely 250,000 now, and the great majority of those who remain are living in the relative safety of the country's Kurdish-controlled north. At least 100,000 had to flee their homes and seek Kurdish protection in 2014 after Islamic State (IS) swept through their ancestral lands. But last year quite a lot of that territory, including some historically Christian towns, was wrested from IS control. A protracted, bloody struggle for control of Mosul, the regional capital, is grinding on (see article), but hard-pressed religious minorities hope and assume that IS will eventually be driven out. All that creates the possibility at least of a collective return.