caldeancath, Author at Chaldean Catholic Foundation

President Trump. Please, keep your Promise!

January 5, 2018 by caldeancath 1 Comment

Iraqi Catholic Archbishop pleads with Trump: ‘We need your help now’

Chief Washington Correspondent November 27, 2017

Read the original post at Yahoo News.

Photos Alex Brandon AP. Filippo Monteforte AFP. Getty Images

WASHINGTON — A senior Iraqi Catholic leader is urgently pleading with President Trump to provide to millions of dollars in aid to rebuild thousands of Christian homes destroyed in the war with the so-called Islamic State, saying the survival of that religious minority may be at stake.

“We need more than words, it’s time for action,“ the Chaldean archbishop of Erbil, Bashar Warda, told Yahoo News in an interview Monday conducted in a hotel in Washington, D.C.

Iraqi Christians

January 3, 2018 by caldeancath Leave a Comment

There have been Christians in Iraq since the time of the Apostles, and they preserve their traditional worship in ancient churches and monasteries. Most Iraqi Christians still speak a modern form of Aramaic (the language of Jesus).

In 2003, around 1.5 million Christians lived in Iraq. Now that number has been reduced to 275,000.

Starting in June 2014, the Islamic State (ISIS) and aligned forces began a major offensive in northern Iraq and captured the city of Mosul and many towns in the plains of Nineveh, causing the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Christians from their historic homeland. Most of them fled to the Kurdistan region and arrived in the territory of the Chaldean Archdiocese of Erbil. Since that time they have lived in refugee camps.

Stand with Us, the Yazidis Escaping Sexual Slavery

January 2, 2018 by caldeancath Leave a Comment

‘We Need People to Stand for Us’ — The Yazidis Escaping Sexual Slavery in the Islamic State

Follow Lara Whyte on Twitter: @LaraWhyte

February 6, 2015 | 5:30 am

Nothing has changed for them. In fact, it has gotten worse!

A displaced Yazidi woman at a school turned refugee shelter in northern Iraq

Read the original post at Vice News.

At 17 years old, ‘Adira’ has already tried to take her own life. A Yazidi teenager kidnapped by the Islamic State as it swept through northern Iraq last summer, herding thousands of members of the minority group into a brutal enslavement, she spent the first few days of her captivity locked in a room with several other girls, sobbing with fear and desperately trying to evade their fate.

Iraqi Christians Depend on the World

January 1, 2018 by caldeancath Leave a Comment

John Neill, a volunteer aid worker for the Chaldean Archdiocese of Erbil is also a professor at Catholic University of Erbil. Somehow, Archbishop Bashar Warda, John Neill, sisters and others, have managed to survive through extreme hardship in difficult times in war-torn Kurdistan.

“The hardest challenge for Iraq’s Christians is uncertainty and not knowing where the next dollar is to come from,” according to John Neill.