A young Iraqi seminarian who risked his life to save the Blessed Sacrament from being desecrated by ISIS during an invasion has returned to the same church as a priest. Martin Baani was 24 when these events unfolded. Rather than leave Iraq with his family, Baani chose to stay and complete his training in Erbil, Read more
An Iraqi archbishop has been caught by President Trump’s temporary ban on citizens from several Muslim countries from traveling to the US. Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil, Iraq, was due to visit the US at the invitation of New Jersey politician, Chris Smith. He intended visiting Washington DC and New York. He was Read more
Freedom from ISIS control was celebrated on Sunday in Qaraqosh with the first mass in two years. Before ISIS took over the area, Qaraqosh was home to the Northern Iraq region’s largest Christian population. The mass was announced with pealing church bells and celebrated in the Church of the Immaculate Conception’s bombed-out shell. The handful Read more
A young boy, 10 years old or so, faces the camera. Like many young boys, he is happy to be interviewed. This is war-torn Iraq, however, so he tells of the day ISIS came to his village. He starts to recount, horror after horror, what took place. It is hard to accept that one so Read more
There was something about Diyaa that his wife’s brothers didn’t like. He was a tyrant, they said, who, after 14 years of marriage, wouldn’t let their sister, Rana, 31, have her own mobile phone. He isolated her from friends and family, guarding her jealously. Although Diyaa and Rana were both from Qaraqosh, the largest Christian Read more
The power of the 24-hour news cycle is that sometimes we hear a story so often that we stop hearing it at all. Unless it comes leaping off the screen at us. Unless it breaks through the headlines for some reason, appears again after its few seconds on Twitter and comes alive outside itself. In Read more
The Vatican’s top diplomat at the United Nations has called for a co-ordinated international force to stop ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Italian Archbishop Silvano Tomasi said there is a type of genocide happening to Christians and other minorities in these countries, which must be stopped. Archbishop Tomasi told Crux’s John Allen that any anti-ISIS Read more
New Zealand’s Catholic bishops have backed the New Zealand Government’s decision to deploy military personnel to help train Iraqi forces. The bishops released a statement on February 24, the same day Prime Minister John Key officially announced the deployment of up to 143 personnel. The deployment, likely in partnership with Australia, will probably start in Read more
The Islamic State has visibly attracted young Muslims from all over the world to its violent movement to build a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. But here’s what’s less visible — the online backlash against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, by young Muslims declaring their opposition to rule by Islamic law, Read more
When Barack Obama vows to destroy Islamic State’s “brand of evil” and David Cameron declares that Islamic State (ISIS) is an “evil organisation” that must be obliterated, they are echoing Tony Blair’s judgment of Saddam Hussein: “But the man’s uniquely evil, isn’t he?” Blair made this observation in November 2002, four months before the invasion Read more