After more than two years of ISIS control, priests today held mass at the Mart Shmoni Church in Bashiqa, east of Mosul, for the first time since it was liberated.

Photographs showed priests inspecting the church, which had been ransaked by militants. Icons could be seen hanging off the walls, chairs broken and trash littered the floor.

Flanked by Peshmerga forces, the priests rang the bell of the church, echoing the bells rung last month in Bartella – another Christian town recently liberated from Islamic State.

Bashiqa was retaken from ISIS as part of the offensive to capture Mosul – ISIS' last stronghold in Iraq – that began on October 17.

Mosul and its surrounding towns and villages, many of which were occupied primarily by Christians, were overrun by ISIS in 2014.

Though many of these towns have now been liberated, it is still considered too dangerous for civilians to return. However, church leaders have begun to return to their churches.

On 30 October, dozens of Iraqi Christians celebrated mass at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Qaraqosh, which was once home to Iraq's largest Christian population.

"Today Qaraqosh is free of Daesh (Islamic State)," Syriac Catholic Archbishop of Mosul Butrus Moshe – who was born in the town – told worshippers.

"Our role today is to remove all the remnants of Daesh," he added. "This includes erasing sedition, separation and conflicts, which victimised us.

"Political and sectarian strife, separating between one man and another, between ruler and follower, these mentalities must be changed." 

The head of the Orthodos church in Bashiqa, Father Bools Mate Afram, told the Guardian in October that he would one day return to his town, but feared that many of his congregation may not.

"I know many families who want to go back but they need international protection to be able to live in Nineveh plains again," he said.

"Many Christians say that under no conditions will they return to Mosul city itself because the chances that it will be a secure and safe city, even after Daesh is gone, are very weak," he said.