Returning to England after a few days in Iraq, it is the sound of broken glass and rubble, crunching underfoot in one of the many destroyed churches, that lingers in my mind. Just a few weeks ago, on my fourth visit to that beleaguered Christian community since the genocide began in the summer of 2014, I was taken, along with Catholic journalist Edward Pentin, to visit the Christian towns on the Nineveh Plains, liberated from ISIS.
It is easy to use the phrase “ghost towns”, yet in the case of Karemlash it is not a phrase but a reality. Before ISIS swept into the area, in August 2014, Karemlash had been a mainly Chaldean Christian town of nearly 10,000 residents.
