The young girl who fled from Iraq and met the Pope
Harshly persecuted for her faith, Sofia ended up finding solace in God and the strength to forgive those who drove her from her country and nearly killed her several times.
On 6 August 2014, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians had to leave everything behind and escape their homeland, as terrorists from the Islamic State overran their villages and towns in the Niniveh Plain.
Among them was Sofia, who was just a 12-year-old girl at the time. Gripped with fear and uncertainty, she could not have known where that journey would eventually take her.
“We didn’t carry anything, as we had no time, and we were not aware what was going to happen. We only had our passports. Some of us got caught on the way and were kidnapped. Mostly women and kids. By God’s grace, me and my family escaped safely, but they burned our house and everything we had. I was 12 years old,” she explains, in a short documentary directed by Sara Isabel, who produced “Your faithfulness” as a university project in Portugal.
The family moved to Syria, but persecution followed them there too. “They used to bomb churches because they knew that Christians go to Church every Sunday,” she recalls.
“One Sunday, I was getting ready for Mass and suddenly a lady came out of nowhere and shouted for us to hide inside the church, then disappeared. She saw missiles about to fall in the area. It was too late. We got inside the church, but we had no time to hide. I was in front of the door and a missile fell right there. Everything exploded. I couldn’t hear or see anything. I couldn’t understand if I was dead or not. And as I opened my eyes, I saw fragments of broken stained glass bypassing my body but not touching me.”
“I knew it was a miracle, physically it was impossible. My death was certain. I had my two siblings by my side, but the dust was so dense I couldn’t see them, for an instant it was terrifying because I couldn’t understand if they were alive. When everything calmed down, I realised they were completely untouched. The miracle that happened to me happened to them too,” the young woman tells the viewers.
Eventually her family made it to England and to peace. Faith continued to be a safe harbour for them, but Sofia could not have guessed what God still had in store for her. As World Youth Day 2023 approached, she applied for a position in Ensemble 23, a group of young dancers who would perform at some of the key events of the gathering. To her great surprise, she was accepted.
“I realised this was the most joyful gift God could give me. I met new people from different backgrounds. We were seen by Catholics from the entire world. I was able to be a messenger of God’s word. We did a Via Crucis and at the end we could feel how we had touched other people’s hearts. We could see the emotion in their faces.”
“The Pope looked at us and made a sign for us to approach him. That was when I fell in tears in front of him, and he placed his hand on my head. After everything I had experienced, his hand was softer than anything in this world. My trust in God made me realise how He had been with me for so long, how He protected me from death, rape, gunshots, kidnapping and all the terrifying things they were doing to us Christians,” Sofia says in the documentary, which can be viewed here.
The young Iraqi woman’s testimony ends with deeply moving statement. “They are forgiven. All the people who hurt me in the past. God’s love is higher than any human evil. If Jesus came down, died on the cross and forgave them, who am I to not forgive?”
When Islamist terrorists forced Christians like Sofia to flee their homelands, Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) stepped in and helped provide solutions and immediate relief. The foundation also helped rebuild homes in Christian villages so that the population could return and continues to work closely with the local Churches to sustain a lasting Christian presence in the region.
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