For the 300 Christians who braved rain and wind to attend the Christmas Eve Mass in this northern Iraqi town, the ceremony evoked both holiday cheer and grim reminders of the war raging around them.

Displaced when Islamic State fighters seized the town in August 2014, the former residents of Bartella were bused in from Irbil, capital of the self-ruled Kurdish region where they have lived for more than two years, to attend the lunchtime service in the Assyrian Orthodox church of Mart Shmoni.

The church had been torched by ISIS militants, but church-supervised volunteers recently cleaned it up after government forces retook Bartella as part of an ongoing campaign to liberate nearby Mosul. But the church is missing its icons, electrical wiring hangs perilously from its ceiling, and most light fixtures are gone. The headless statue of a late patriarch stands in the front yard, its pedestal surrounded by shards of glass.

For many of the churchgoers, the sight of their home town in ruins was shocking. Only a few homes in the once vibrant town of some 25,000 people stand unscathed.

On one street wall, the Islamic State black banner remains visible under white paint. Next to it, someone wrote: “Christ is the light of the world. Bartella is Christian.”

People attend Christmas mass in the Assyrian Orthodox church of Mart Shmoni, in Bartella, Iraq, Saturday. (Cengiz Yar/AP)

“Our joy is bigger than our sadness,” said Nevine Ibrahim, 20, who was in Bartella for the first time since her family left in 2014. They found their house badly damaged. Everything they owned was gone.

“I don’t think we can return. The house can be fixed, but the pain inside us cannot,” she said, seated with three of her siblings. “Who will protect us?”

Halfway through the service, conducted in Assyrian and Arabic, it became something of a wartime Mass. Roughly a dozen U.S. military servicemen and a 100-man contingent from the Iraqi military led by several top generals descended on the church in a show of solidarity.

The distant thud of explosions could be heard after the service. But none of that seemed to dampen the worshipers’ joyous spirit.

“This is the Mass of defiance,” Assyrian priest Yacoub Saady told the congregation at the end of the service. “We are staying put, and no power can force us to leave.”

His words, however, seemed more hopeful than realistic.

— Associated Press

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