God Bless the People of Kurdistan
Wonderful News! Archbishop Bashar Warda is smiling today. According to the Washington Free Beacon, $150 million in aid for religious minorities will help them rebuild after ISIS genocide.
America is shifting funds away from the United Nations to provide massive financial assistance to rebuild the infrastructure and improve millions of lives in Northern Iraq in an area called Kurdistan. Vice-President Pence made the major announcement to fully support the Iraqi Christians.
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.
Read more at https://www.yahoo.com/news/iraqi-archbishop-pleads-trump-need-help-now-220932489.html
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.
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.