Chaldean patriarch returns to Baghdad after nine months of self-imposed exile amid political dispute

By ALI JABAR and ABBY SEWELL
Associated Press

BAGHDAD (AP) — A prominent Iraqi Christian religious leader who left Baghdad amid a political dispute last year has returned to the capital at the invitation of the country’s prime minister. Cardinal Louis Sako led his first mass in Baghdad on Friday after returning the day before. He had withdrawn from his headquarters in Baghdad to the Kurdish regional capital of Irbil last July after Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid revoked a decree recognizing his position as patriarch of the Chaldeans, Iraq’s largest Christian denomination and one of the Catholic Church’s eastern rites.