Pope Francis revealed that he escaped two assassination attempts during his visit to Iraq in March 2021, including one involving a young woman who was believed to be attempting a suicide bombing. The attacks were planned to take place in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and former stronghold of the Islamic State jihadist group from 2014 to 2017.
The pope shared the details of these attempts in an excerpt from his 400-page autobiography, Spera (Hope), released today—his 88th birthday—by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. The complete book is scheduled to be published in Italian in mid-January.
“I had been advised against that trip by almost everyone, which would have been the first by a pontiff in the Middle Eastern region devastated by extremist violence and jihadist profanations,” Francis recalled.
“Covid-19 had not yet completely loosened its grip, even the nuncio in that country, Monsignor Mitja Leskovar, had just tested positive for the virus,” he said.
“And, above all else, every source highlighted the very high security risk profile [of the visit], so much so that bloody attacks had even marred the eve of the departure,” he added.
“But I wanted to go all the way. I felt I had to. I said, familiarly, that I felt the need to go and visit our grandfather Abraham, the common ancestor of Jews, Christians and Muslims,” the pope said.
“If your grandfather’s house burns down, if in his country his descendants risk their lives or have lost it, the [best] thing to do is to reach the house as soon as possible.”
He recalled that Pope John Paul II had desired to go to Iraq to open the Jubilee Year 2000, but Saddam Hussein did not permit him. So, Francis said, “one could not disappoint the people a second time.”
The extract from the autobiography published today picks up at the point when Francis flew by helicopter to Mosul on March 6, viewing the destruction down below. “As I flew over it, it appeared to me from above as the X-ray of hatred, one of the most efficient feelings of our time, because it often generates by itself the pretexts that unleash it: politics, justice, and always, in a blasphemous way, religion, that become a facade, hypocritical and provisional motivations; because then, just like in the beautiful verses of the Polish poet Wisawa Szymborska, hatred ‘runs all alone.’”
Pope Francis remarked that “even after that devastation, the wind of hatred still did not subside.”
He recalled, “They warned me as soon as we landed in Baghdad the day before. The [Iraqi] police had alerted the Vatican Gendarmerie of a report from the British secret services: a woman stuffed with explosives, a young suicide bomber was heading to Mosul to blow herself up during the papal visit. And a van had also left at full speed with the same intent.”
But, he said, “The [pope’s] journey continued.”
He recalled “meetings with the authorities in the presidential palace in Baghdad” and a meeting “with bishops, priests, religious and catechists in the Syriac Catholic cathedral Sayidat al-Nejat (Our Lady of Salvation), where eleven years earlier two priests and forty-six faithful had been massacred, for whom the cause of beatification is underway.”
Then, he said, there was “the meeting with the religious leaders of the country in the plain of Ur, the deserted expanse where the ruins of Abraham’s house border the stepped tower of the wonderful Sumerian Ziggurat.”
He recalled that “Christians of different Churches, Muslims, both Shiites and Sunnis, Yazidis, finally found themselves together under the same tent, in the spirit of Abraham, to remind us that the most blasphemous of offenses is to profane the name of God by hating one’s brother.”
The Argentine pope recalled that before traveling to Ur, he visited “the holy city of Najaf, the historical and spiritual center of Shiite Islam, where the tomb of Ali, the Prophet’s cousin, is located.”
He said he went there “for a meeting behind closed doors that I cared about very much, because it would represent a milestone in the path of interreligious dialogue and understanding between peoples.” It was “the meeting with the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, that the Holy See had been preparing for decades, without any of my predecessors having been able to achieve it.”
He recalled: “Ayatollah Al-Sistani welcomed me fraternally into his home, a gesture that in the East is even more eloquent than declarations and documents, because it signifies friendship, belonging to the same family. He did good for my soul and made me feel honored: he had never received heads of state, and he had never stood up, yet that day, significantly, he did so with me several times, while with the same feeling of respect I showed up without shoes in his room.”
During their conversation, he said, “I perceived his concern for the mixture of religion and politics, a certain idiosyncrasy which I felt we shared for the ‘clerics of state’ and, at the same time, the common exhortation to the great powers to renounce the language of wars, by giving priority to reason and wisdom. I remember one of his phrases in particular, which I then took with me as a precious gift: ‘Human beings are either brothers by religion or equal by creation.’”
Returning to the attempts on his life, Pope Francis said, “When I asked the Gendarmerie the following day [March 7] what was known about the two attackers, the commander replied laconically: ‘They are no longer there.’ The Iraqi police had intercepted them, and blew them up.”
Francis remarked, “This also struck me a lot. This too was the poisoned fruit of war.”
