In November 2015 I visited Syria together with an International Peace delegation. This was my third visit to Syria in the last three years. As on previous occasions I was moved by the spirit of resilience and courage of the people of Syria.
People of faith, civil society groups, and communities affected by climate change marched together in Rome Sunday Jun. 28 to express gratitude to Pope Francis for the release of his
Laudato Si encyclical on the environment, and call for bolder climate action by world leaders.
Is this one of those rare occasions where policy-makers self-critically correct a gigantic blunder? Or is it a cold turnabout guided by pure self-interest?
Al-Waer, Homs’s most populated area and the city’s last insurgent holdout, might soon achieve the truce that Hom’s Old City saw in May this year when, in an exchange deal, the insurgents left their strongholds.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called on the Sri Lankan government to "take necessary measures" to prevent any further attacks against minority Muslims in the country.
Malki Hana says his men are afraid of cameras. “Most of them are army defectors and they may easily get in trouble," says this commander of a mostly unknown armed group in Syria.
While wrangling over Central African Republic’s (CAR) wealth in natural resources played a role in the country's crisis, its future peace and stability still partly depends on a solution that factors in how to equitably distribute its national wealth.
There are growing concerns that the massive funding crisis for peacekeeping operations in the Central African Republic (CAR) will jeopardise any prospect of restoring stability to the country.
Reports of horrific revenge killing continued to emerge from the Central African Republic Wednesday, less than 24 hours after the Security Council voted to increase the international troop presence there and levy sanctions against those it suspects of war crimes.
“We couldn’t stand the violence anymore,” said 27-year-old Baba Hamadou shortly after alighting from a chartered flight at the Douala International Airport earlier this week.
In the municipal sports hall with an army officer to his side, Father Gabriel Nadaf, a Greek Orthodox Arab priest in full regalia, briefs Arab Christian twelfth-graders on the merits of serving in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). “It’s only natural that the country which protects us deserves that we contribute to its defence,” he tells them.
Like most Christians in Pakistan, Johar Maseeh did a little cleaning job. He was a sweeper in a factory in Peshawar, capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in northern Pakistan.
Standing in front of the two-metre concrete wall, barbed wire and corrugated iron fence that surrounds his mosque, Muhammad Iqbal says he feels like a second-class citizen in his own country.
Luis Shabi nostalgically recalls his nine years of novitiate in Rome and a "fantastic road trip through Europe" before returning to Iraq in 1969. "Those were the good times," sighs the Chaldean Archbishop of Baghdad from a bunker in the heart of the Iraqi capital.
Younas Gill, a self-employed tax accountant, sits on the pavement in Joseph Colony, Lahore, staring at the place where, until about a month ago, his home had stood.
When a young Christian girl goes missing in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, her family will call on a certain Muslim sheikh in the nearby town of El-Ameriya.
Jewish groups have reacted furiously to a
letter to Congress by 15 leaders of Christian denominations asking for a review of whether some of the three billion dollars in annual United States aid to Israel is being used in violation of U.S. law and policies.
Many of Egypt's Coptic Christians met the recent assumption of the presidency by the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi with trepidation, even panic – some even made plans to leave the country. Almost three month's into Morsi's term, these fears, say some experts, appear largely unfounded.