With the defeat of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq, the Iraqi prime minister has called on Christians to return home to Iraq. Mustafa Al-Kazemi said, in a statement issued by the government, that Iraq was “serious about providing assistance to our Christian families and solving their problems.”
The self-declared caliphate of the Islamic State (ISIS), whose territory once spanned parts of Iraq and Syria, has been extinguished, but the group’s influence is very much alive. In Mosul, Iraq, a city that’s about 250 miles north of Baghdad, two years after the defeat of ISIS, it is still impossible for Christians to return to their homes because it remains unsafe for them.
Within just the last few days, two senior Catholic prelates from Iraq have referred to plans for Pope Francis to visit the country next year as, essentially, a done deal.
Announcing his desire to visit Iraq in 2020, Pope Francis called for a peaceful resolution to crises in the Middle East.
The Tablet Staff Archbishop Bashar Matti Warda of Iraq is warning that Christianity in his country is close to disappearing. “One of the oldest Churches, if not the oldest Church in the world, is perilously close to extinction. Those of us who remain must be ready to face martyrdom,” Archbishop Warda, a Chaldean Catholic […]
When ISIS stormed into the villages of Karamless and Qaraqosh in Iraq’s Nineveh Plains on August 6, 2014, the Feast of the Transfiguration took on a whole new meaning for Christians, with ISIS burning and looting their homes and churches while inhabitants fled for their lives.
This Christmas season, as we hear about the slaughter of the innocents and the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, imagine that it is happening today. Imagine you are doing something about it.
Tariq Aziz, a Chaldean Catholic who represented Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein’s government on the world stage as foreign minister and deputy prime minister, died June 5 after suffering a heart attack. Aziz, 79, died in a hospital in the southern Iraq city of Nasiriya after being transferred from a prison where he had been held under […]
As Holy Week and Easter approached, Pope Francis wanted to show his ongoing concern for people persecuted and displaced by violence in Iraq and in northern Nigeria.
Staff have been getting training from experts who have worked for the U.N. or who have military experience to learn how to “monitor and evaluate the security situation” in the places they are working.
