Patriarch in urgent appeal as COVID-19 cases top 5,000 The leader of Iraq’s largest Christian community has issued an urgent plea for people to stay at home amid growing fears that the country cannot cope with a spiralling number of COVID-19 cases. Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael I Sako said [...]
A massive programme has just received the go ahead to help revive a Christian village in Iraq, which was almost completely razed to the ground after being seized by Daesh (ISIS). The plan for Batnaya devised by Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) will involve restoring the [...]
Middle East Christians are at direct risk of a second genocide which threatens them with wipe-out from the lands of the Bible. Christians could face total eradication from countries such as Iraq and Syria, where they have existed since the time of Christ’s first apostles. Father Andrzej Halemba, head of [...]
An ACN partner, Msgr Bashar Warda, Chaldean Catholic Archdiocese of Erbil in Iraq, gave an address to the United Nations security council on December 3rd. Here is what he had to say to the international community. Address of Archbishop Bashar Warda, Kurdistan Region, Iraq To: UN Security Council, New York. December [...]
It was only in March of this year that ISIS lost the final vestiges of its “caliphate” in Syria, and last week that Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the world’s most notorious terrorist, died in a shootout with American soldiers. Meanwhile, life in a Christian region to the north of Mosul, the [...]
Although Iraqi Christians, concentrated in the north of the country, lie far from the epicentre of deadly protests in Baghdad, their fate may be tied to the outcome of what demonstrators are calling a “revolution” in Iraq. by Xavier Bisits While protestors in Baghdad have emphasized interfaith unity, protests have [...]
Fr. Dr. Andrzej Halemba from the Pontifical Foundation “Aid to the Church in Need” receives the “Pro Redemptione” Award Poland, 19 October 2019 Today, during a ceremony at the Major Seminary of the Redemptorist Congregation in Poland Fr. Andrew Halemba PhD, director of the Middle East section of the Pontifical [...]
On August 6, 2014, IS units razed and conquered the Christian settlements of the Nineveh Plain, north of Mosul. Some 120,000 Christians had to flee overnight. Many of them found refuge around the Kurdish city of Erbil. For the following three years, the Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Erbil, Mgr. Bashar [...]
In Kurdistan, Iraq, a new Catholic hospital and university bring hope to an embattled Christian community by Ragheb Elias Karash CHALDEAN ARCHBISHOP Bashar Warda of Erbil, Kurdistan has been the prime mover behind the establishment of two major new Christian institutions in the region. In 2016, the Catholic University in [...]
Exactly 2 years ago, on 10 July 2017 the Iraqi government declared the defeat of Daesh (ISIS). The liberation of Mosul took place three years after the city had been subjected to strict sharia law, including forced conversions, mass executions and a resurgence of slavery. When the city was liberated, [...]
