LONDON -- Anarchic development and looting in war-torn Iraq are the greatest threats to its treasure trove of archaeological heritage, warned Iraqi archaeologist Lamia al-Gailani. Gailani, an associate researcher at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, said more than one-third of the site of the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, on the outskirts of Mosul, has been covered...
For the first time in modern Turkey's 96-year history, a Christian minority is poised to begin construction of a new church with permission from the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government. As a result of the efforts of the Syriac community, a plot in Istanbul's Yesilkoy district has been allocated to the Virgin Mary Ancient Syriac Church Foundation in the city for the project.
Baghdad -- Fr Najib Mikhael Moussa and Fr Robert Jarjis were ordained today respectively as archbishop of Mosul and auxiliary of Baghdad. During the Mass for the episcopal ordinations, celebrated today (pictured) in Saint Joseph Cathedral, Card Louis Raphael Sako, delivered the homily.
Despite the defeat of Islamic State forces on the battlefields of northern Iraq in 2017 and the advance of democracy in a country once ruled by the brutal Saddam Hussein, these are difficult times in Iraq, especially for beleaguered Christians of various ethnicities who have been dispossessed of their ancestral lands on the Nineveh Plain.
The Christian population that had made up one fifth of the Ottoman Empire's population was wiped out in waves of violence by successive Ottoman and Turkish republican governments that left Christians a tiny minority in Anatolia, two Israeli scholars have said in a new study.
Questions persist throughout Iraq regarding whether ISIS is truly defeated or will rise again, perhaps under the banner of another terrorist organization. For Iraqi Christians, the question is often not if, but when. Though defeated militarily, the ideology of ISIS remains victorious in Iraq. Nowhere is this undercurrent more apparent than in the educational curriculum.