ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - Kurdistan Region Prime Minister Masrour Barzani on Sunday inaugurated the Umm al-Noor Syriac Orthodox Church in Erbil’s Christian-majority district of Ankawa.

The church, which was built by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), is set on an area of approximately 5,000 square meters and will accommodate over 1,000 people. 

“I am very pleased to participate in the opening of Umm al-Noor Church. I hope this church will become an important place of worship for our Christian brothers and sisters in Ankawa and will be a center for further development of brotherhood and friendship among different religions and the further development of coexistence in the Kurdistan Region,” Barzani said at the ceremony. 

The church is designated for Syriac Orthodox refugees displaced to the Kurdistan Region, especially following the Islamic State’s (ISIS) brutal onslaught across their ancestral homeland in the Nineveh Plains in 2014. 

“Some of them have remained in the Kurdistan Region until now due to the instability of their areas,” Barzani said about the refugees, adding that Erbil “will continue its efforts to end this imposed situation in the Nineveh Plains and create a calm and stable environment so that our brothers and sisters can return with dignity and willingly to their homes and churches.”

Various armed groups have been accused of occupying historically Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syriac Christian towns in the Nineveh Plains after ISIS was driven out of the area. 

Chief among them is the Babylon Movement, an Iran-backed, nominally-Christian party and militia affiliated with Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The party and its leader, Rayan al-Kildani, have been repeatedly slammed for land grabs in Christian-majority towns in the Nineveh Plains, as well as in the capital Baghdad. 

Its armed wing, the Babylon Brigades or the PMF’s 50th Brigade, is routinely accused of threatening Christian residents in Nineveh and Baghdad, particularly in the former, after ISIS was defeated in the area. A Washington Institute profile of the brigade in March 2023 described it as “a local Christian force but has been recruited largely from Shia Muslim communities in Baghdad’s Sadr City, al-Muthanna, and Dhi Qar.” 

Khalid Jamal, head of Christian affairs at the KRG’s endowment and religious affairs ministry, told The New Region that construction of the Umm al-Noor church began in 2012 but was halted as a financial crisis gripped the Kurdistan Region. 

According to Jamal, 151 churches, 76 shrines, and 10 Christian monasteries exist in the Kurdistan Region.