Bartella's Christians returned home last year to celebrate Easter together (World Watch Monitor)
Bartella’s Christians returned home last year to celebrate Easter together (World Watch Monitor)

Four children were wounded on Easter Monday when a bomb exploded outside a medical complex in Bartella, east of Mosul, according to Iraqi News.

No group has claimed responsibility but it is believed that Islamic State militants were behind it, a source told the news site. Despite its military defeat, IS continues to launch sporadic attacks across Iraq.

Bartella, in the Nineveh Plains, was largely inhabited by Syriac Orthodox Christians when IS seized the town in August 2014. Many of the 2,000 Christian families fled 70km east to Erbil.

World Watch Monitor reported this week that some of the Christian families to have returned to their cities following IS’s defeat were celebrating their first Easter back home.

One returnee said: “In December 2017 we returned to ‘our Holy Land’, Qaraqosh. We were expecting to witness a disaster created and left by IS. However, when we entered our city, I was re-born and I still have that feeling. I could not sleep properly even a single night in France [where his family lived during their displacement]. I don’t regret that we returned at all.”