WASHINGTON – The military operation to liberate the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State group is not the only solution needed to get life back to normal, said Iraqi Archbishop Bashar Warda of Irbil.

BAGHDAD – The Rev. Martin Banni, a Chaldean Catholic priest, grabbed the Eucharist, the church’s official documents and a few personal items ahead of the Islamic State fighters’ assault on Karemlash, a town 18 miles southeast of Mosul, two years ago.

AMMAN, Jordan – Iraqi Christians are cautiously welcoming the start of the battle for Mosul and the Ninevah Plain, their ancestral homeland of the past 14 centuries from which they were brutally driven out by the Islamic State group more than two years ago.

BAGHDAD – Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Sako of Baghdad called for a united and strong stance – by Muslims and non-Muslims alike – to stop the spread of the "cancer" of Islamic State and other terrorist groups.

AINKAWA, Iraq – Iraqi Christians appear divided about whether they will be able to return home after Islamic State militants are flushed out of the battle-scarred Ninevah Plains region. They say their safety must be guaranteed at all costs.

AINKAWA, Iraq – Abu and Um Sabah had to trade a tent anchored in a soft, grassy patch in a park for a roughly hewn, five-story unfinished cement building as they sat out their forced displacement by Islamic State militants for a second year.

As Armenian Catholics, the Moubayed’s don’t want to disagree with the Pope. But as Syrians who fled their home in Aleppo last year while the bombs came closer and closer, the married couple are not so sure peace is possible.

PARIS – The urgent pleas for national unity heard after every terrorist attack in France are sounding ever more strained as the killers inspired by the Islamic State group nimbly shift their tactics and targets and confound the politicians struggling to combat them.

ROME – France was convulsed by another horrific attack as armed men burst into a Catholic Church near Rouen and slit the throat of a priest who was saying Mass.

A French priest was killed and another person seriously wounded after two attackers took hostages inside a church in northern France this morning.

It was February 2015 and American singer-songwriter Audrey Assad was working with fellow Catholic artist Matt Maher on his new album. She was sitting in Maher’s backyard when she came across the shocking video online. Twenty-one Egyptian Coptic Christian men were about to be beheaded by the Islamic State on a Libyan beach.

AL-QAA, Lebanon – Boulos al-Ahmar had just driven the ambulance to the scene of the explosion when more bombs detonated, killing him. When Majed Wehbe heard the first explosions near his home, he ran to the scene to help, only to arrive in time for the next set of explosions. 

Give credit to the federal government for recently acknowledging that the systematic murder, rape and enslavement of the Yazidi people of Iraq and Syria constitutes genocide. But why stop there? 

LONDON – Catholic Relief Services and other international aid agencies are working with local Christian and Muslim charities to help about 70,000 people fleeing Fallujah, Iraq, as conflict deepens between Islamic State militants and Iraqi forces seeking to regain the beleaguered town in Anbar province.

VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis is calling on Catholics to play a part in the “rebirth” of a united Europe that opens its doors to refugees.