As the campaign to liberate Mosul from ISIS rages on, Christian residents of surrounding villages already freed from the terror army’s grip have returned to find their homes booby-trapped, in ruins and uninhabitable.
(FOX)- Ethnic and religious minority groups like the Yazidi and Assyrian Christians were driven from their ancestral homelands across the Nineveh Plain when the Islamic State attempted to establish their caliphate.
Also known as the Plain of Mosul, the region has long been the ancestral homeland for the Assyrian-Chaldean-Syriac Christians, along with other religious minority groups, but for the last two years they have been subjected to persecution and genocide at the hand of ISIS militants.
The villages of Bashiqa, Bartella, Karamles, Qaraqosh and Tellisqof were recently liberated from ISIS by the Nineveh Protection Units (NPU) and Iraqi Special Forces, but many of these villages have been left in complete disarray by the terror group.
In some towns, most of the infrastructure has been reduced to rubble; in others, dangerous chemical compounds have been dumped, polluting the ground. But what all the places have in common is that they are unsafe and nearly impossible for those who fled to return any time soon.