For Iraqi Catholics, it's a date they will never forget. The takeover of Mosul by militants of the Islamic State group 10 years ago began their bloody and destructive rampage over the weeks that followed through the country's ancestral heartland which Christians called home for the past 16 centuries.

IRBIL, Iraq -- Having witnessed or even experienced persecution for their faith, the Christians of Iraq must be careful not to harbor thoughts of revenge, Pope Francis told them.

QARAQOSH, Iraq -- Amid the rubble and bombed out remains of four churches destroyed by Islamic State militants, Pope Francis paid tribute to Iraqi Christians who endured persecution and even death.

WASHINGTON -- The genocide conducted by the Islamic State against Christian communities in Iraq and Syria has turned into continued harassment by Iran-backed militias and shows no signs of abating soon.

AMMAN, Jordan -- The Chaldean Catholic Church concluded a weeklong synod in Ainkawa, a Christian enclave in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil, in which laity from the church's various dioceses in the Middle East and the diaspora also participated for the first time.

WASHINGTON -- Chaldean Christians in northern Iraq are determined to continue their 2,000-year-long mission despite the near-deadly blow inflicted by Islamic State forces and new challenges from nongovernment militias, said a priest ministering in the region.

BEIRUT -- The first time a band of Islamic State militants "visited" the monks, they presented the monks with a kind of suggestion, in a nonthreatening manner: "Why don't you become a Muslim?"

WASHINGTON - The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee March 2 unanimously passed a bipartisan measure condemning as genocide the killing of Christians, Yezidis and other ethnic and religious minorities by Islamic State militants in the Middle East.

PARIS - A day after Islamic extremists massacred 130 people in Paris last month, a Muslim-Catholic couple married in Lyon. It had to be a civil ceremony because the Muslim family refused to enter a church. Shocked by the attacks, some relatives even asked whether they should go ahead with the ceremony at all.

VATICAN CITY - "This is not human," Pope Francis said after a night of terror in Paris left more than 120 people dead and more than 200 people injured.