Recently, Hume City Mayor Joseph Haweil, who is of Assyrian and Greek descent has ensured that the significant presence of Assyrian-Australians in his municipality is reflected in the local topography by naming one of its streets after the capital of ancient Assyria, Nineveh.
(AFP) -- The bells of St. Joseph's Chaldean Cathedral echo across Baghdad, signalling the start of Mass for the dwindling congregation that has stayed in the scarred Iraqi capital against all odds. "This is a safe space," says Mariam, a 17-year-old Chaldean Catholic among the few dozen attending the service. Elderly women pray solemnly, their hair covered in delicate black veils.
Maryam Shmoil thought it was unusual that she and her daughter were stopped on Nov. 6 from entering into Nahla Valley, a northern Iraqi region home to ethnic Assyrians. Shmoil owns a house in the area and said she travels from Erbil to Nahla nearly every weekend, but a new checkpoint was turning away visitors and limiting the amount of food and energy resources for locals.
Officials from the Syrian opposition group known as the Peace and Freedom Front, an alliance of Kurdish, Assyrian, and Arabic parties, arrived earlier this week in Turkey to meet with Turkish, EU, and US diplomats on the situation in Syria.
The American Dream has come true for the man who was once the face of the Iraqi deportation fight here in metro Detroit. Sam Hamama was sworn in as a U.S. citizen Friday morning at the Department of Homeland Security immigration offices in Detroit. Last January, after a 2 1/2 year legal battle, a judge ruled that Hamama can stay with his family in West Bloomfield.
ROSARIO, Argentina -- Ever since the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS), there's been rising alarm regarding the future for Christians in the Middle East. A Catholic priest who recently returned to his village in northern Iraq after six years in Rome described what he found as "shocking," but doubled down on the need for Christians to survive.