Iraq’s ancient Christian community is still hanging on, twenty years after the U.S. invasion forced thousands of Christians to flee and nine years after the Islamic State threatened to wipe out those who remained.
The Vatican announced Monday that Pope Francis will make a three-day visit to Iraq in March as a show of support for the nation’s beleaguered Christian community.
Europe must rediscover its Christian heritage and not be afraid of promoting openly Christian values, said Iraqi Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako in an interview this week.
A luxury Lamborghini Huracan donated to Pope Francis last autumn has fetched nearly $1 million at a Sotheby’s auction May 12 in Monaco.
The number of Assyrians now living in the United States and Mexico after being forced out of the cradle of Christianity in and around Iraq by Islamic extremists may soon exceed the number of their counterparts living at home, according to author Eric Metaxas.
An estimated 50,000 Christians returned home in Iraq in time to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ on Christmas after facing genocide at the hands of Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) jihadists who forced them out of their homeland in 2014, reveals the president of the Assyrian Aid Society branch in Iraq (AAS-I).
Christians living in the Nineveh Plains, who only just returned home after the defeat of the Islamic State, are once again on the move, forced to flee as Kurdish fighters clash with Iraqi government forces north of Mosul.
U.S.-backed Iraqi troops and their allies expect to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) in Mosul, the jihadist group’s last major enclave in Iraq, within no more than a month.
They were threatened, forced to spit on a crucifix or convert to Islam, but a handful of Iraqi Christians miraculously survived more than two years under Islamic State group rule.
Some members of the Iraqi Christian minority community are seeking to establish an autonomous territory in their historical homeland in northern Iraq’s Nineveh Plain region after the city of Mosul is liberated from the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) and the jihadist group is defeated, reports Al-Monitor.
In a joint statement released Sunday, the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch and the Syriac Catholic Patriarch commemorated the second anniversary of the Islamic State’s occupation of Mosul and the Nineveh Plain, chronicling their atrocities and demanding the immediate liberation of ISIS-controlled lands.
Tears welled in the eyes of the Assyrian Army commander fighting to protect Christian communities from the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) in Iraq and Syria when he reached the section of the Arlington National Cemetery where American service members who died in the name of Iraqi freedom have been laid to rest.
