Cardinal Issues Warning

Middle East ‘weapons and disorder’ win out over timid international mediation

“We are responsible in the search for peace, for dialogue: the international community, the countries of the Middle East are all involved. However, if we ourselves do not know how to personally put an end to this spiral, it will be others who must help us find the way to achieve it.” This is the warning issued by the Baghdad Patriarch of the Chaldeans, Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako, in the face of the spiral of violence that has engulfed the region, bloodied in the past year by conflicts of increasingly broader scope: from Gaza, with the war launched by Israel on Hamas in response to the Oct. 7, 2023 attack, to Lebanon with the “northern front” opened by the Jewish state in an attempt to eliminate the “threat” of Hezbollah.

Then there are the other actors in the area, from the Shiite Houthi in Yemen to Iran, with the prospect of a large-scale escalation. “The situation is worrying,” he warns, “There is no listening to reason and responsibility, especially toward civilians who pay the highest price. And the international assembly is timid, there are appeals and mediations, but they are stagnant and fail to move forward.”

For Cardinal Sako, the presence of the militias is not only a source of concern for regional repercussions, because in the recent history of the Chaldean Church they have represented an element of internal tension that threatens to result in a devastating rift. The “scandal of the Chaldean Church” as the primate calls it, which denounces “the influences, even on the material level with concrete aid” to which some church communities are subjected.

The reference is to one militia in particular: the Babylon Brigades of self-styled leader Rayan al-Kildani, which fomented divisions, maneuvered for the withdrawal of the presidential decree that resulted in the self-exile (who returned months later) of Cardinal Sako and prompted five bishops to boycott the last Chaldean Synod. Some realities, he denounced, “receive money and aid from a certain militia, they are not autonomous, and this is a great wound: the Church does not need money, but faith, and the clergy must serve in a total way, with passion, and independent of certain politics or interests.”

– AsiaNews