BAGHDAD (Agenzia Fides): People who fled the cities of the Nineveh Plain in northern Iraq in the face of the brutal onslaught by Islamic State militants in 2014, found refuge in Baghdad in and around a building in the Zayouna district, now known as the Virgin Mary Refugee Camp.
However their precarious circumstance is coming under threat from the commercial interests of entrepreneurs and the Iraqi capital’s urban development plans, with more than 120 Christian families being asked to move out in favour of the construction of a shopping centre.
Chaldean Patriarch Louis Raphael Cardinal Sako visited the complex to express his solidarity with the people staying in the refugee shelters and speak with displaced families about their concerns. With the new school year just beginning and winter approaching, the cardinal called on political authorities “to postpone the evacuation for at least a year or to find a reasonable alternative to house these families.”
