Pope leads mass at Baghdad's Chaldean Cathedral

During the service, the pope paid tribute to "those of our brothers and sisters who here too have suffered prejudice and indignities, mistreatment and persecutions for the name of Jesus."

Coronavirus restrictions limited the number of people allowed in the church to about 100, but they included the country's president, foreign minister and the speaker of the house of parliament, all of whom are Muslim.

The Chaldean Church is Eastern Rite affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church but allowed to keep its traditions and rituals.

Iraq's Christian community, one of the oldest in the world, has been particularly devastated, falling to about 300,000 from about 1.5 million before the U.S. invasion and the brutal Islamist militant violence that followed.