In the sun-soaked courtyard of Baghdad's St Joseph Cathedral, members of Iraq's dwindling Christian community waited in solemn silence for a man they'd never dreamt they would see.

Some of the women, who appeared to outnumber the men, wore dainty black or white veils, a sign of respect for the leader of their faith, 84-year-old Pope Francis.

They sat on wooden benches decorated with bright flowers and fingered rosaries or small prayer books as they counted down the minutes for the pontiff to arrive.

Then, suddenly, the quiet was shattered by shrill ululations as hundreds of hands spontaneously flew toward the sky.

The white-clad pope had just stepped into the outer courtyard -- and he too seemed just as happy to be close to his faithful.

The other gatherings of his Iraq visit -- in Baghdad on Friday and at the ancient site of Ur earlier on Saturday -- were much more orchestrated, and Francis was physically further from worshippers.

Young attendees were rare in Baghdad amid the rows upon rows of greying hair and eyes ringed by wrinkles -- but they were visibly excited.

Many pulled out their phones to take selfies, tugging down their masks to reveal ear-to-ear grins for the historic occasion.

A children's choir had been prepped to welcome Francis with song.

"We've been practising for three whole days!" said one of the young girls, wearing an oversized cap with the pope's face printed on it.

Inside the church, the congregation greeted Francis with more ululations and wisps of incense, ubiquitous in the Chaldean liturgy.

They sung Arabic hymns about love and heaven, muffled only slightly by medical masks worn to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

- 'Heal these wounds' -

Attendance was limited to allow for social distancing, amid fears the service could become a super spreader event as a deadly second wave of coronavirus cases has hit Iraq.

Each church in Baghdad granted just 13 invitations to distribute to their parish, according to Father Nadheer Dakko of the St. Joseph Cathedral.

"This is the first real encounter his Holiness is having with his flock," he told AFP.

As the pope began delivering his homily in Latin, many raised their phones to begin filming while listening intently to the Arabic translation.

Francis spoke of the humility of love, of bearing witness, of strength in the face of persecution.

It resonated for Nabeel Yaacoub, a 46-year-old Baghdad resident.

"I survived everything, all of the sectarianism, the violence, the explosions in Baghdad," said Yaacoub, sitting in the first row in the church's courtyard, where he could watch the service on a screen.

"Now that the pope is here, in this land where there has been so much hurt, he can heal these wounds," he told AFP. "It's like a father finally coming home."

In a first on the Iraq trip, communion was served.

Francis blessed the bread and wine, which Catholics believe are the body and blood of Jesus Christ, but did not give out the Eucharist himself.

Instead, a half dozen priests fanned out across the church to spray disinfectant in the hands of the faithful before placing the communion bread in their palms.

- 'Viva Papa' -

One woman asked a priest to place a Eucharist in a small jewelled metal box to take home to a sick relative.

As Francis was leaving, people starting screaming "Viva Papa".

The limited tickets had irked many Baghdadi Christians, who had skirted around security checkpoints set up all around the church to reach its gates.

"I've been waiting outside the church since noon, but I've been waiting for this moment my whole life," said Samira Youssef, a Catholic Iraqi who came with her sister to try to attend the mass.

"If they don't let me in? I'll cry."

Nearby, a young child scratched his head while looking at the Vatican guards, easily three times his height, blocking the church gate.

"I live around the corner and I come here all the time to light candles," said Fahad, a 12-year-old Muslim.

"But today the pope is here! Still, I hope it'll become normal. I hope he comes to Iraq all the time."

Pope, top Shiite cleric plead for 'peace' in historic Iraq encounter
Baghdad (AFP) March 6, 2021 - Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, one of Shiite Islam's top clerics, told Pope Francis in a historic meeting in Iraq on Saturday that the country's Christians should live in "peace".

The meeting, on the second day of the first-ever papal visit to Iraq, marked a landmark moment in modern religious history and in terms of Francis's efforts to deepen interfaith dialogue.

Pope Francis later addressed the rich spectrum of Iraq's religious communities at Ur, traditional birthplace of the Prophet Abraham, a central figure in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths, where he made an impassioned plea for "unity" after conflict.

The 84-year-old pontiff's trip to Iraq is an effort to both reassure the country's ancient but dwindling Christian community and expand his dialogue with other faiths.

His meeting with the grand ayatollah in Najaf lasted 50 minutes, and Sistani's office put out a statement shortly afterwards thanking Francis for visiting the holy city.

Sistani, 90, "affirmed his concern that Christian citizens should live like all Iraqis in peace and security, and with their full constitutional rights," it said.

His office published an image of the two, neither wearing masks: Sistani in a black turban with his wispy grey beard reaching down to his black robe and Francis all in white, looking directly at the grand ayatollah.

Sistani is extremely reclusive and rarely grants meetings but made an exception to host Francis.

The pontiff had landed earlier at Najaf airport, where posters featured a famous saying by Ali, the fourth caliph and the Prophet Mohammed's relative, who is buried in the holy city.

"People are of two kinds, either your brothers in faith or your equals in humanity," read the banners.

- 'It all started here' -

Francis then headed straight to the desert site of the ancient city of Ur, where Abraham is believed to have been born in the second millenium BC.

"It all started from here," Francis said, after hearing from representatives of Iraq's diverse religious communities.

There were Yazidis, whose ancestral heartland of Sinjar was ravaged by the Islamic State (IS) group in 2014, as well as Mandeans, Kakais, Bahais and Zoroastrians.

Shiite and Sunni sheikhs, as well as Christian clerics, were there. Each was wearing their traditional religious garb, with a dozen different types of robe and headdress on display in the red-carpeted pavilion set up for the visit.

Iraq is a Muslim-majority country of 40 million whose Christian population has shrunk in the past two decades to just one percent, with minorities still complaining of ostracism and persecution.

During his address, the pope said freedom of conscience and of religion were "fundamental rights" that should be respected everywhere.

"We believers cannot be silent when terrorism abuses religion," Francis said, in a message of solidarity with the minorities persecuted under IS rule.

He also made an impassioned plea for "unity" after conflict.

"Let us ask for this in praying for the whole Middle East. Here I think especially of neighbouring war-torn Syria," he said.

Following the prayer service in Ur, the pope headed back to Baghdad to celebrate his first public mass in the country, at the Saint Joseph Cathedral.

In front of a sparse gathering of faithful and officials, with attendance limited by coronavirus precautions, he delivered his first-ever liturgy in the Eastern rite.

- 'Cease partisan interests' -

Francis, a strong proponent of interfaith dialogue, has met top Sunni clerics in several Muslim-majority countries, including Bangladesh, Morocco, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

Sistani, meanwhile, is followed by most of the world's 200 million Shiites -- a minority among Muslims but the majority in Iraq -- and is a national figure for Iraqis.

In 2019, he stood with Iraqi protesters demanding better public services and rejecting external interference in Iraq's domestic affairs.

Pope Francis made a similar plea in Baghdad on Friday.

"May partisan interests cease, those outside interests who don't take into account the local population," he said.

Sistani has had a complicated relationship with his birthplace Iran, where the other main seat of Shiite religious authority lies: Qom.

While Najaf affirms the separation of religion and politics, Qom believes the top cleric -- Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- should also govern.

Iraqi clerics and Christian leaders said the visit could strengthen Najaf's standing compared with Qom.

In Abu Dhabi in 2019, the pope met Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the imam of the Al-Azhar mosque in Cairo and a key authority for Sunni Muslims.

They signed a text encouraging Christian-Muslim dialogue, which Catholic clerics hoped Sistani would also back, but the meeting passed without such an endorsement.

While the pope has been vaccinated and encouraged others to get the jab, Sistani's office has not announced his vaccination.

Iraq is currently gripped by a resurgence of coronavirus cases, recording more than 5,000 infections and more than two dozen deaths daily.

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Grand Ayatollah Sistani, Iraq's 'shepherd', to meet Pope Francis
Baghdad (AFP) March 5, 2021
Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the highest religious authority for Iraq's Shiite Muslims, has wielded subtle but unprecedented power for a cleric, guiding his followers through decades of dictatorship, occupation and conflict. The highly reclusive 90-year-old is set to meet the Catholic Church leader Pope Francis in the holy shrine city of Najaf on Saturday, during the first papal visit to Iraq. It will be a rare in-person meeting for Sistani, whose sermons are typically delivered through a repr ... read more