WEST BLOOMFIELD, Michigan -- He has been the face of the Iraqi deportation fight here in metro Detroit. Now after a 2 1/2 year legal battle, a judge has ruled Sam Hamama can stay with his family in West Bloomfield. The 7 Investigators were the first to take you inside the lock-up facility where Hamama was being held back in 2017.
Since January 11, an elderly Assyrian Christian couple, Hurmuz Diril (71) and his wife Şimoni (65), have been missing from the Assyrian village of Mehr, Kovankaya in the province of Sirnak, in Turkey's southeast. In wintry, sub-zero conditions, their children, followed by military special units, have been searching for them. "We found out that my parents were missing when I and my relatives...
The main street of Tal Hafyan in Syria's northeast is as packed as ever, but almost no one is from here. "A local family? I think there's still one in that house but I couldn't tell," says a man among a group of five struggling to get a car out of the mud. Most of those here are displaced families from Ras al-Ayn, one of the Syrian locations under control of Turkey's proxy militias.
Security forces have stepped up a search operation for a couple belonging to the Chaldean Catholic minority group in Turkey's southeastern Şırnak province (story). No sight or sound have been caught of Hurmuz and Şimuni Diril, ethnic Assyrians living in the remote village Kovankaya near the town of Beytüşşebap, since Jan. 11.
They died as martyrs, killed in December 2016 by a gang of militiamen who had held them hostage for years. This is apparently the fate of the two Archbishops of Aleppo, the Greek Orthodox Boulos Yazigi and the Orthodox Syrian Mar Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim, who disappeared on April 22 without leaving a trace, in the area between the Syrian metropolis and the border with Turkey.
Patriarch Louis Sako of the Chaldean Catholic Church took the unprecedented move of cancelling Christmas celebrations in Iraq, following the violence unleashed upon regime protesters in Baghdad and elsewhere that left hundreds dead. "Morally and spiritually," Cardinal Sako told Associated Press, "we cannot celebrate in such an atmosphere of tension ...