Under the gun
"The Lord is my shepherd,” says the psalmist, but Nicodemus Daoud Sharaf is finding it devilishly hard to tend his flock. As archbishop of Mosul’s Syriac Orthodox church, he has been chased out of one of Christianity’s oldest dioceses. Most of his congregation fled when the city was conquered by the jihadists of Islamic State […]"The Lord is my shepherd,” says the psalmist, but Nicodemus Daoud Sharaf is finding it devilishly hard to tend his flock. As archbishop of Mosul’s Syriac Orthodox church, he has been chased out of one of Christianity’s oldest dioceses. Most of his congregation fled when the city was conquered by the jihadists of Islamic State (IS); now he ministers to what is left of it in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdish region.
Archbishop Nicodemus says he was the last senior churchman to leave Mosul in July 2014. Since then, he says, 32 churches in Mosul and in the surrounding plain of Nineveh have been burnt or put to other uses. His cathedral is now a mosque dedicated to jihad. “For the first time in the history of Christianity, there are no Christians praying in Mosul,” he adds, weeping. “Even under the Mongol hordes and Hulagu Khan [in the 13th century] it wasn’t so bad.”
