Iraqi Official Promises Recapture of Mosul this Year

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal, reporting that the U.S. is deploying an additional 560 troops to aid the Iraqi government in the campaign to liberate Mosul, also quotes a senior Iraqi official who said, “we promise the Iraqi people that Mosul will be liberated before the end of this year.”

SPC has repeatedly said we thought Christians displaced by the Islamic State would begin going home this year.  This expectation was based on the numerous small villages on the Nineveh Plain outside of Mosul which have been reclaimed from the Islamic State by the Kurdish Peshmerga militia and the Iraqi military – although Christians are not yet returning to those villages in large numbers.  On the other hand, 120,000 Yazidis have returned to the region of Sinjar, on the west side of Mosul.

Of course, in Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari, vowed to end Boko Haram’s reign of terror by the end of last year.  That deadline came and went, but the Nigerian military is making great progress in the containment of Boko Haram.  The value of articulating such timelines is not that they will be precisely kept, but that they express a commitment to achieve victory against terrorism and an end to the violence against Christians.

Please join us here at SPC in praying that our Christian brothers and sisters in Iraq, Nigeria, and Syria will soon be able to go home.