Christian Child Refugee Becomes Singing Sensation in Lebanon

Mirna Hana, 12, fled the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) for Lebanon months ago. She took her talents to the national program The Voice Kids, where she stunned the judges with her breathtaking renditions of “Yesterday in a Dream” and “Let It Go.”

“After we got to Lebanon, my dad told me that Daesh [ISIS] wanted to kidnap and kill me. From then I felt very scared at night, and I couldn’t sleep alone, or be by myself,” she explained.

The young Chaldean Christian received support from the Chaldean Nation Facebook page:

“Everybody knows the difficulties of Iraq, from ISIS and how they slaughter the people and how they take their houses,” stated her father. “They threatened us with the kidnapping our [sic] the little girl, so we came here. We left everything behind us – even my job with the government.”

Kazem El Saher turned around right when she sang “Yesterday in a Dream.” Not much longer after that, judges Nancy Ajram and Tamer Hosny turned around to view the magnificent talent behind them.

Ajram attempted to pull Mirna onto her team with “costumes from Frozen,” while Tamer promised her “a chance to be in his films.”

But Saher won her over when he offered her the ability “to sing whatever she wanted.”

More than 500,000 Chaldean Catholics lived in Iraq before the Islamic State invaded it in the summer of 2014. They were originally known as The Church of Assyria and Mosul as part of the Church of the East. They entered into communion with the Catholic Church between the 16th and 18th centuries.

However, the faith holds its own “unique liturgy and tradition while recognising the Pope’s authority.” The church elected Louis Sako as the Chaldean Catholic Patriarchate of Babylon and the Head of the Caldean Catholic Church.

In July 2014, Sako said the Islamic State is “worse than Mongol leader Genghis Khan and his grandson Hulagu who ransacked medieval Baghdad.” The majority of the Chaldeans resided in Mosul.

“How in the 21st century could people be forced from their houses just because they are Christian, or Shi’ite or Sunni or Yazidi?” he said, adding:

Christian families have been expelled from their houses and their valuables were stolen and … their houses and property expropriated in the name of the Islamic State. This has never happened in Christian or Islamic history. Even Genghis Khan or Hulagu didn’t do this.