There was an armed guard on the front and rear gates at St Joseph’s Church in the Ankawa district of Erbil. “Mostly for show,” assured the Archbishop’s aide with a smile as I stepped in. Security was tight for a reason. 

Six years before, the jihadists of the so-called Islamic State had much of western Iraq in their grip, including the Kurdish region. More than 125,000 Christians, mainly Chaldean, had been brutally displaced from their homelands.