There were gasps, followed by tears at a small church in northern Iraq as a group of Christians returned to their parish Sunday to find that everything had been destroyed, including the statue of the Virgin Mary, which ISIS militants had decapitated before they left.
A confessional had been turned into a closet, a tomb had been desecrated, red prayer benches were burned. As Fr Thabet Habib recited prayers at the St Addai Chaldean Catholic church, the sound of broken glass crunched beneath worshippers' feet.
