The head of the Iraqi government in Basra has appealed to Iraqi Christians who fled the terrors of Islamic State to return home.

Civil authorities in Iraq's main port city are using the Christmas and New Year celebrations marking the start of 2017 to try to reassure and encourage Christians that they still have a future in Iraq, Fides reports.

Khalaf Abdul al Samad, head of the city council, pledged during a visit to an Armenian church in Basra to support the  rebuilding and recovery of the city's churches.

He called on Christian Iraqi refugees who had fled their homes to return to their land of origin, especially in those areas now liberated from the control of the Islamic State jihadists.

Samad, a Dutch-educated Shiite Muslim who has spent part of his political career in exile, is close to al-Maliki, a prominent Shia dissident during the rule of Saddam Hussein. Maliki was Prime Minister of Iraq from 2006 to 2014 and is currently one of the country's Vice Presidents.

The Christian population in Basra, 590 km south of Baghdad, has plummeted in recent years.

About 2,500 Christians lived there, mainly Chaldean Catholics, before the Iraq-Iran war. They made up a large part of the city's merchant class. Now there are a few hundred families left at most.

Across Iraq, in 2003 there were about 1.5 million Christians, just more than six per cent of the population. This was half the number of 1947.

Estimates of the Iraqi Christian population now put it as low as 200,000, or even fewer.

Signs that the situation might be improving were apparent last April, however, when about 200 Chaldeans made the traditional pilgrimage from Baghdad to Ur, believed to be the birthplace of the Biblical patriarch Abraham, to mark the Pope's Year of Mercy.