On the night of 16th January 2016, between the hours of 11pm to 3am, a Kurdish village in Kurdistan, northern Iraq was attacked with missiles by Turkish planes, destroying houses, fields and even the local water storage facility of the village. The attack forced 37 families out of their homes.
For Mgr Rabban al-Qas, Chaldean bishop of Amadiyah and Zaku, “We must have the courage to call this for what it is: real terrorism!”
“All these families have fled and now can no longer live in the village because everything has been destroyed, including the water storage,” said a distressed Mgr Rabban.
Mgr Rabban yesterday (the morning after the attack) donated US$10, 000 to help the villages cope with their emergent and unfortunate situation.
The Turkish planes were said to have intended the attack on PKK bases (the Kurdish Workers’ Party, which is considered a terrorist organisation in Turkey), but struck instead 37 families that had been living in the village of Sharamesh for years, a few kilometres from Zaku, including eight families that had fled the Nineveh Plain before it was overrun by Islamic State (IS) group.
