What the Christian community in Iraq faces can only be defined as intense hatred and hostility. Since 2003, Christians in central and southern Iraq have been subjected to killing, abuse, kidnapping, discrimination, and forced displacement.
CARDINAL Louis Sako, patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church, has announced he is withdrawing from his headquarters in Baghdad after Iraqi President Abdul Rashid revoked a decree recognising him as head of the Christian Church in Iraq.
BAGHDAD: Iraqi Christians quietly celebrated Christmas on Tuesday amid improved security, more than a year after the country declared victory over Daesh militants who threatened to end their 2,000-year history in Iraq.
To many, the Druze are an enigma, Arabic-speaking followers of an esoteric Abrahamic faith rooted in Islam, but which branched out on a different spiritual path in the 11th century.
Last week in Jerusalem, as Jews celebrated Passover and Muslims observed Ramadan, violent images were broadcast of Palestinian thugs vandalising the Al-Aqsa Mosque and hurling Molotov cocktails, stones, and fireworks on the Temple Mount itself and at Jews praying at the Western Wall.
The Islamic State group’s caliphate was mostly defeated as a territorially consolidated entity in Iraq by late 2017. Yet some of the most vulnerable peoples it targeted, such as Yazidis and Christian Assyrians, remain under existential threat.
In Feb. 15 2015, the world reacted with revulsion to the release of a video showing the savage execution of 21 men on a Mediterranean beach, near Sirte in Libya.
The rabbinic tradition speaks of a Jerusalem above and a Jerusalem below. It imagines the earthbound city as a reflection of a heavenly one—the latter perfect and the former aspiring to perfection.
