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| Iraq |
| Iraq PM orders all-out effort to secure archbishop's release |
| 2008-03-05 |
| Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Tuesday ordered Iraqi security forces to make all-out efforts to secure the release of a kidnapped Chaldean Catholic archbishop. Paulos Faraj Rahho was kidnapped last Friday in the northern city of Mosul after a deadly shootout in which three of his companions were killed. “The prime minister has asked the interior minister and all security officials of Nineveh province to follow the case and work very hard to release (Rahho) as soon as possible,” Maliki’s office said in a statement. Maliki said that any attack “on the Christian community is an offence against all Iraqis.” “The Christian community is an essential part of Iraq. It can’t be separated from the people and the country’s civilisation,” said the Shia prime minister of the predominantly Muslim country. Iraqi forces in Mosul have fanned out to search for Rahho whose abduction has been branded as “atrocious” by Pope Benedict XVI. Rahhu, seized while on his way home after holding mass, was the latest in a long line of Christian clerics to be abducted in Iraq since the US-led invasion of March 2003. Iraq’s Christians, with the Chaldean rite by far the largest community, were said to number as many as 800,000 before the invasion. The number today is believed to have dropped to half that figure due to massive emigration. Associated with the “Crusader” invaders and regarded as well off, they are often victims of sectarian cleansing, killings and kidnappings at the hands of Sunni and Shia Islamists, as well as criminal gangs. On January 6, a series of bombs exploded outside churches and a monastery in Mosul, in an apparently coordinated attack that wounded four people and damaged buildings, as Christians celebrated Epiphany. Cardinal Emmanuel III Delly, the 80-year-old patriarch of the Baghdad-based Chaldean Catholic Church, was among 23 clerics whom the pope elevated to the status of cardinal in November. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #2 Maliki has been very busy, in meetings that did not happen, with operatives from the Obama campaign team. Don Vito, alias the Lichtensteiner, alias Skunky |
| Posted by: Don Vito Gluck4405 2008-03-05 11:01 |
| #1 As he should do. About bloody time he realized it. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-03-05 06:37 |