Dohuk, Iraq -- Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Cardinal Louis Sako is concerned by rising tensions between the United States and Iran, fearful that his country, Iraq, could be caught in the middle of any potential conflict. It has also made a proposed visit by Pope Francis to Iraq next year uncertain, he said.
Ankara's hair-raising human-rights record, including an ongoing attempt to erase all vestiges of other religions and cultures in Turkey, is one reason that it has been prevented from realizing its long-standing dream of membership in the European Union.
What Iraq's Christians want from the West is to say the plain truth: that there is ethnic cleansing of Christians in the region and it is ongoing, Dr Tim Stanley told a meeting at the UK's parliament last Tuesday, 9 July. The historian and columnist, working for UK daily newspaper The Telegraph, just returned from a visit to Iraq's Nineveh Plains.
UK police are investigating a Christian charity to determine if it financed terrorism after its chairman was involved in the freeing of 226 hostages held by ISIS in Syria in 2016. The Assyrian Church of the East Relief Organisation (Acero) is chaired by the bishop of Syria, Mar Afram Athneil, but is run by Andy Darmoo, 71, who is the director of a lighting company in southern England.
For two years, Sam Hamama has been living in a hellish limbo. It all started on a Sunday morning in June 2017, when six agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement came to his home in West Bloomfield, Michigan, while he, his wife and his four children were getting ready to attend a church service.
While educational degree holders can pave way to a great career for most of us, there are some people who beat the odds and become successful even without an impressive academic degree in hand. Alan Lazar, an LA-based serial entrepreneur, internet marketing expert and investor, dropped out of college and took the job of a telemarketer to support his mother and younger brother, after his parents...
ŞIRNAK, Turkey -- With their hometown cleared of terrorist elements, the Chaldean Christian community in southeastern Turkey has returned to restore their local church. Eight Chaldean families were forced to leave their home in the 1990s due to escalating terror in the region.
(AFP) -- A car bomb detonated near a church in the Kurdish-majority city of Qamishli in northeast Syria on Thursday wounding several people, an AFP journalist and state media said. The metal gate of the church was slightly dented by the blast, but the building otherwise emerged intact, the correspondent said.
Deep in the back offices of Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad, at the end of a long corridor set away from the Babylonian obelisks and Assyrian winged bulls, an international treasure hunt is under way. Wafaa Hassan is sitting at her desk, poring over a large stack of papers, sighing as she turns each page.
Exactly two years on from the liberation of Mosul from Daesh (ISIS), only 40 Christians at most have returned home to Iraq's second city. Father Amanuel Adel Kloo, the only priest in Mosul, said most of the faithful are still too afraid to return to the city whose Christian roots date back 1,800 years or more.
In ancient times, Mesopotamia, meaning 'land between two rivers', was a vast region that lay between the Tigris and Euphrates river systems, and it is where civilization emerged over 7,000 years ago. The first inhabitants, the Sumerians, established an advanced system writing, spectacular arts and architecture, astronomy and mathematics.
I grew up among people who were never able to return to their homes. They spent their entire lives pining for their wives and children, wondering about the state of repair of their places of abode and died without ever seeing them. One of them, who we called "pappou Niko" would muse, every July: "With us it was foretold.
(AINA) -- A new book titled La France et les Assyro-Chaldéens - qu'en dit la presse? (France and the Assyro-Chaldeans -- What does the press say?) has been published by Claire Weibel Yacoub, a French historian and author of three books on Assyrians.1 The book's introduction starts with the bold title "Return of the Assyro-Chaldeans on the stage.
Netherlands (AINA) -- A delegation from the Assyrian Confederation of Europe (ACE) visited the Dutch parliament and presented its latest report on the situation of Assyrians on 22 May. The delegation met with several MPs from the Christian Union party who have voiced concern for the future of Assyrians in their ancestral homeland Assyria which is carved up by Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran.
(AINA) -- On May 4-5 the Salahaddin University in Erbil, Iraq and the French Institute of the Near East (IFPO) organized a workshop titled Christianity in Iraq at the turn of Islam. Its aim was to discuss important institutional changes for Christians in areas of the collapsed Persian Empire and retreated Byzantine Empire which were conquered by Muslims.
On January 2, 2018, Judge Goldsmith from the federal court in Michigan ordered the release of Assyrian (also known as Chaldean or Syriac) Christian detainees who had been held for deportation. In his decision, the judge cited that the country conditions in Iraq precluded the possibility of returning the refugees to their homes safely.
During the years of World War I 75% (750,000) of the Assyrian population in the Ottoman Empire was systematically murdered. That genocide of Assyrians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 is a fact, but it has largely been forgotten by the world.
(AINA) -- When speaking about the Ottoman Empire and Turkey today, it is not their contribution to civilization that comes to mind. Instead it is human rights violations, confiscation of land and property, genocide and genocide denials that are most frequently discussed in the public discourse. Today's Turkey is still far from being ruled by democratic principles.
While educational degree holders can pave way to a great career for most of us, there are some people who beat the odds and become successful even without an impressive academic degree in hand. Alan Lazar, an LA-based serial entrepreneur, internet marketing expert and investor, dropped out of college and took the job of a telemarketer to support his mother and younger brother, after his parents...
In ancient times, Mesopotamia, meaning 'land between two rivers', was a vast region that lay between the Tigris and Euphrates river systems, and it is where civilization emerged over 7,000 years ago. The first inhabitants, the Sumerians, established an advanced system writing, spectacular arts and architecture, astronomy and mathematics.