Good news

This photo is one of many in Michael Yon's latest dispatch from Baghdad. It must be one of the happiest he's ever done. The priest is Most Reverend Shlemon Warduni and he is celebrating mass in St John’s Church, until recently abandoned.

A couple of the captions.

LTC Michael told me today that when al Qaeda came to Dora, they began harassing Christians first, charging them “rent.” It was the local Muslims, according to LTC Michael, who first came to him for help to protect the Christians in his area. That’s right. LTC Michael told me more than once that the Muslims reached out to him to protect the Christians from al Qaeda...Most of the Christians are gone now; having fled to Syria, Jordan or Northern Iraq.

This next is the most moving one. We can start talking about success in Iraq when the 1 (2?) million refugees start coming back.

The Muslims in this neighborhood worry that other people will take the homes of their Christian neighbors, and that the Christians will never come back. And so they came to St John’s today in force, and they showed their faces, and they said, “Come back to Iraq. Come home.” They wanted the cameras to catch it. They wanted to spread the word: Come home. Muslims keep telling me to get it on the news. “Tell the Christians to come home to their country Iraq.”