“At night we often hear gunfire,” says Father Steven, a priest in Alqosh, Iraq.

“But luckily we are quite a bit away from the fighting,” he adds. In fact, as the crow flies, the town of Alqosh is only 10 miles away from the front line, where the heavily armed Kurdish Peshmerga forces and ISIS fighters are facing off.

 When the weather is good, you can see the Christian towns on the Nineveh Plane that are now under ISIS control.

“Back there is my village, Batnaya,” the Chaldean priest says, pointing in the direction of the once-Christian community. “I was the last to leave Batnaya. The jihadists arrived shortly thereafter.”

Dozens of priests and religious have become homeless in the past year as a result of the ISIS offensive. They have not only lost their convents, churches and monasteries, but also schools and children’s homes – the entire infrastructure of an apostolate built up over many years.

“We lost 23 of our monasteries and houses,” Sister Suhama tells international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need. The Dominican nun now lives in a development of terraced houses near Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan.

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