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Italian cardinal sent to Iraq as Isis advances

Pope Francis is sending an Italian cardinal to Iraq to help thousands of Christians fleeing the rapid advance of jihadis of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Isis), the Vatican said on Friday.

Published: 8 August 2014 14:36 CEST

Italian cardinal sent to Iraq as Isis advances

Cardinal Fernando Filoni is being sent to Iraqi Kurdistan. Photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP

Cardinal Fernando Filoni, a former papal nuncio to the country, is being sent to Iraqi Kurdistan to show the pope's “spiritual support and the church's
solidarity with the people who are suffering”, papal spokesman Federico Lombardi said. He said Filoni would be departing soon but gave no date.

The Vatican has come in for criticism from Eastern Christians not doing more to help the persecuted minority, who are fleeing into the mountains alongside thousands of members of the minority Yazidi community in the face of a rapid advance north by Sunni extremists.

Francis had appealed on Thursday for the international community to mobilize to protect and ensure aid for the fleeing populations, thousands of whom have been stranded on mountain tops with little food or water.

The Vatican's own representative for Christians in the Middle East, Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, said humanitarian intervention of a completely different order was needed to stop “the painful and unjust exodus of Christians” from Iraq.

SEE ALSO: Eni to stay in Iraq despite oil refinery attacks

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Ex-jihadi housewife jailed in Norway for joining IS

The Kurdish-run al-Hol camp which holds suspected relatives of Islamic State fighters.Photo: Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP

The Oslo court sentenced the Norwegian-Pakistani woman to three and a half years in prison for “participating in a terrorist organisation” by taking care of her household and enabling her three husbands to fight.

“By travelling to an area controlled by IS in Syria… by moving in and living with her husbands, taking care of the children and various tasks at home, the defendant enabled her three husbands to actively participate in IS fighting,” judge Ingmar Nilsen said as he read out the verdict.

Being a housewife to three successive husbands did not render her a passive bystander, the judge said.

“On the contrary, she was a supporter who enabled the jihad, looked after her three husbands at home and raised the new generation of IS recruits,” he said.

The young woman, who admitted having “radical ideas” at the time, left for Syria in early 2013 to join an Islamist fighter, Bastian Vasquez, who was fighting the regime.

Although she did not take up arms herself, she was accused of having allowed her husbands to go fight while taking care of her two children and household chores.

The trial was the first prosecution in Norway of someone who had returned after joining IS.

“This is a special case,” prosecutor Geir Evanger acknowledged during the trial.

“This is the first time that, to put it bluntly, someone has been charged for being a wife and mother.”

The prosecution had called for a four-year sentence, while the defence had called for her acquittal and immediately appealed Tuesday’s verdict.

The woman’s lawyer, Nils Christian Nordhus, argued that his client had quickly wanted to leave Syria after being subjected to domestic violence.

She had also been a victim of human trafficking because she had been held against her will, he added.

But the judge stressed that she had participated in the organisation “knowingly” and of her own will.

The woman was repatriated to Norway in early 2020 on humanitarian grounds with her two children, including a young boy described as seriously ill.

At least four other Norwegian women and their children are being held in Kurdish-controlled camps in Syria.

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