CHALDEAN DIGEST ‘ISIS
CHALDEAN DIGEST ‘ISIS brides’ will return to Sydney An Iraqi soldier helps a family carry their child to cross from an Islamic State-controlled part of Mosul to an area controlled by Iraqi forces during the battle for Mosul in 2017. Photos: CNS photo/Goran Tomasevic, In 2014, ISIS captured Mosul, an ultimatum was put forth, and a mass exodus of Christians to other parts of the world ensued. Around 61,000 Assyrians and Chaldeans now call Australia home, with three-quarters living in Western Sydney. Soon, they may be forced to live alongside their persecutors; the Albanese Government has proposed to repatriate 16 women, relatives, and wives of former ISIS fighters from detention camps in northeast Syria where they have been living since ISIS’s final defeat by Kurdish forces in 2019. The so-called “ISIS brides” are Australian citizens They would be repatriated along with 42 children, some of whom were born in detention overseas. At least a dozen Australian men Sako proposes uniting churches A proposal put forth by Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako, Patriarch of the Baghdad-based Chaldean Church, for his Church to enter full Communion with another historic Middle Eastern Church is a sound idea but its application would be not be easy, a leading scholar has warned. Said Patriarch Sako in a speech last month: “I have studied our Eastern heritage and the writings of the Fathers of the Church, and I see nothing to prevent the union of the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the East under the name Church of the East.” Both Churches have shrunk in the last four decades as a result of economic emigration accelerated by persecution and political turbulence. Patriarch Sako said there was an urgent need to reflect on a “project of unity” because so many Middle Eastern Christian communities were “characterized by … emigration.” who fought for ISIS are also in detention overseas. Some have expressed regret and sorrow and wish to return to Australia. Some of the women have relatives in Sydney and may resettle in suburbs in which Assyrians and Chaldeans live. Archbishop Nona is ambivalent about the process. “It’s not easy for us to live with people who persecuted us,” he said in a statement, “who forced us to leave everything and killed our people.” He heard about the government’s proposal from media reports and told The Catholic Weekly on October 10 that his community had not been forewarned or consulted about the decision. The de facto spokesperson for the women, “ISIS bride” Mariam Dabboussy, claims she and her husband were tricked by her brother-in-law into going to Syria to join ISIS. Some of the other women likewise claim they were coerced, forced to remarry when their husbands were killed, and suffer from degrading conditions in the Syrian refugee camps. Whatever the government’s decision about resettling former members of ISIS in Sydney, Archbishop Nona said Christians cannot return to Iraq – and few Australian Chaldeans would want to. “We are a small minority there, and after many, many years and decades of persecution it’s difficult for our people who are now here to think about that land, their homeland,” he said. – The Catholic Weekly Since 2003, roughly 70 per cent of Iraq’s Chaldeans are believed to have left Iraq. Christian scholars raise some concerns about the union, primarily questioning papal authority and autonomy. Professor Dietmar Winkler, a consultant on the Vatican’s dialogue with Eastern Churches, said given that the Assyrian Church “cannot accept papal authority … A new ecumenical model must be developed, but it does not yet exist.” – The Tablet PHOTO COURTESY OF REUTERS Chaldean Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako (left) and Bishop Basilio Yaldo visit the “Virgin Mary compound” in Baghdad, Iraq, Oct. 5, 2022. Eviction for Christian refugees in Baghdad The same families who fled Mosul in 2014 in advance of ISIS terrorists and settled in Baghdad in and around a building in the Zayouna district, now known as the “Virgin Mary” Refugee Camp, are being forced to move again, this time giving way to the commercial interests of entrepreneurs and the Iraqi capital’s urban development plans. Over the past few days, more than 120 Christian families have been asked to move out of the building complex in which they are housed to make room for a new shopping center to be built in the area. Recently, Chaldean Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako visited the complex to express his solidarity with the people staying in the refugee shelters on land owned by the state, and to express and speak to displaced families about their concerns. With the new school year that has just begun and winter approaching, the Iraqi Cardinal turned to the political authorities, according to the Chaldean Patriarchate, “to postpone the evacuation for at least a year or to find a reasonable alternative to house these families.” “The Church is doing its best,” he continued, “to stop the deportation of the families who were displaced from several areas in the Nineveh Plain. The complex also contains non-displaced Christian families who do not have the financial means to rent houses to live in.” The Baghdad government, which owns the property where the buildings stand, has ordered them vacated by the end of the year. Baghdad Auxiliary Bishop Basilio Yaldo said in a statement that the diocese is planning to use several church buildings in the area to house the displaced families and Christians. Work on the centers is already underway. According to the bishop, the residents of the complex include Christians of all churches: Chaldeans, Syriac Catholics, Syriac Orthodox, Assyrians, and others. – Catholic News Agency SAINT-ADDAY.COM VIA ACI MENA 12 CHALDEAN NEWS NOVEMBER 2022
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