A pair of hands gripped his throat. He shouted. It was raining, and the clatter of the drops muffled his cries, so he shouted louder. At last, people from neighboring tents came running, and the assailants disappeared.

Wasil had left his mother and younger siblings in Kunduz, Afghanistan, ten months earlier, in December, 2015. His father, an interpreter for NATO forces, had fled the country after receiving death threats from the Taliban.

Later, Wasil, as the eldest son, became the Taliban's surrogate target. Wasil was close to his mother, but she decided to send him away as the situation became increasingly dangerous. Her brother lived in England, and she hoped that Wasil could join him there.

To get to Calais, Wasil had travelled almost four thousand miles, across much of Asia and Europe, by himself. Along the way, he had survived for ten days in a forest with only two bottles of water, two biscuits, and a packet of dates to sustain him.

Before leaving home, he hadn't even known how to prepare a meal.

Wasil was stunned by the conditions of the Jungle. The camp, a forty-acre assemblage of tents, situated on a vast windswept sandlot that had formerly served as a landfill, didn't seem fit for human habitation.

"I did not come here for luxury," Wasil told me, in excellent English, which he had learned from his father. "But I can't believe this is happening in Europe."

A chemical plant loomed nearby. There was no running water, and when it rained the refugees' tents filled with mud and the camp's rudimentary roads became impassable. Continue reading

Sources

• Article by Lauren Collins in The New Yorker
• Image: My Catbird Seat

The military offensive to root out ISIS militants from Mosul and surrounding villages will be a "huge challenge", the United Nations (UN) has said.

The UN said it expects about 1.5 million people to flee the warfare in a short amount of time.

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and other humanitarian agencies - including Caritas and other Catholic groups - in Iraq are scurrying to ready preparations.

It as it is believed the US-led assault could be pushed forward as early as September. But aid groups fear they may be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers involved.

The UN that as the Mosul crisis evolves, up to 13 million people throughout Iraq may need humanitarian aid by the year's end - far larger than the Syrian crisis.

This would make the humanitarian operation in Mosul likely the single largest, most complex in the world in 2016.

Bruno Geddo, UNHCR chief for Iraq, told the US Catholic News Service that the United Nations has issued an appeal for the $284 million needed in part for the "preparation of camps ahead of the humanitarian emergency from Mosul".

He said a cluster of camps needs to be built in six locations in disputed territory.

"Not only do you have to make sure that the location is not in the direct range in the line of fire," he said, "but the terrain must be fit to build a camp."

He said safety and security screenings were top priorities as Sunni Muslims flood out of Mosul, controlled by ISIS for the past two years.

Iraqi authorities will be charged with conducting the security screenings to identify ISIS collaborators.

Source

• Catholic Herald
• AMN
• Image: Pixabay

But the Rev. Mussie Zerai, a 40-year-old Roman Catholic priest from tiny Eritrea, north of Ethiopia, has moved to help migrants trapped in the North African deserts and rickety wooden boats drifting across the sea.

"It is my duty and moral obligation as a priest to help these people. For me it's simple: Jesus said we must love one another as we love ourselves," Zerai said in a telephone interview.

The little-known priest, now based in Rome and Switzerland, was among this year's nominees for the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize, along with Pope Francis.

(The prize, announced Friday, was awarded to the National Dialogue Quartet, which helped build a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia.)

Zerai runs a center that receives calls from distressed migrants who have fled their countries in hopes of finding a better life in Europe.

He relays refugees' GPS coordinates to coast guard and naval authorities so they can launch rescue operations.

Most of the migrants are from Syria, the horn of Africa and sub-Saharan Africa and are fleeing political and social situations in their countries of origin. Eritreans, Ethiopians and Somalis make up most of their numbers.

They usually attempt to cross to Italy through Libya, Egypt and Morocco.

"Many of them are fleeing war, religious, political and ethnic persecution. Then, there are dictatorships and poverty which are causing this exodus," said Zerai.

In North Africa, some of the migrants are captured by traffickers who seek ransoms from their families. Those who cannot pay ransom are sold to those who harvest organs for illegal transplants.

In the Mediterranean, 3,000 migrants on the voyages have died this year so far, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Observers say the number of deaths is expected to increase as the cold season approaches. Continue reading

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter, from an article by Fredrick Nzwili, a journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya.
• Image: BBC

He's spent a lot of the last year turning heads and forcing double takes, but most of the time he's been merely offering Christian truths, the same ones preached by countless bishops throughout the ages and memorized by a billion youthful catechists.

Francis has been less a revolutionary theologian than he might seem, but who can remember another Christian leader whose interpretation of the gospels seemed at once so relevant, so moral, so contemporary, so wise?

Not since Billy Graham has a singular pastor seemed to speak to so many.

When speaking on issues beyond theology, Francis has employed a similar strategy — apply familiar Catholic values to vexing contemporary matters and wait for the world's knees to buckle.

His message last week about the refugee crisis in Europe was a very good example: When he shamed all of Europe for responding with insufficient urgency and generosity to the needs of the millions flooding there, mostly from Syria, his message was galvanizing — even though he said nothing, really, that any compassionate Sunday-school teacher wouldn't say.

He urged the developed countries of Europe to show their concern for the displaced masses in deeds, not just words, and he commanded Catholics to do the same, asking "every parish, every religious community, every monastery, every sanctuary of Europe take in one family, starting with my diocese of Rome."

These words — together with a photo of a toddler, drowned and facedown in the sand — made obvious what should have been obvious all along.

Caring especially (and not additionally or incidentally) for the homeless, the stranger, and the victimized should be every Christian's priority. Continue reading

• Lisa Miller is currently a contributing editor for New York Magazine, from which the above article is taken.

Back then, the German chancellor said she was "deeply upset" — today she is "appalled." Back then, the president of the European Commission said he would never forget the dead, and that something had to change — today he claims: "The status quo is not an option."

Back then, Europe's interior ministers spoke of a horrific event — today it's an "utter horror.'" The gap between then and now is 19 months. And several thousands of dead in the Mediterranean.

Then was the night of Oct. 3, 2013. A fire broke out on an old cutter that had set out from the Libyan city of Misrata. Near the small Italian island of Lampedusa, more than 500 people went overboard, most of them from Somalia or Eritrea.

Not even one-third survived. The coffins in Lampedusa's airport hangar became a symbol for Europe's "shame," as Pope Francis put it.

At a meeting in Luxembourg held after the disaster, EU interior ministers spoke of a "wake-up call" and immediately established a working group. European Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström argued that Lampedusa was an "image of the Union that we do not want."

In Berlin, the German government declared that "given a human catastrophe of this size," it was self-evident that current refugee policies should reexamined.

Shortly thereafter, German Chancellor Angela Merkel traveled to a summit of EU heads of government in Brussels, where "decisive measures" were promised to avoid a repeat of the catastrophe.

And then? Then the catastrophe repeated itself. A dozen times. Between then and now.

In the space of a few days in April, 400 people traveling from Africa to Europe drowned in the Mediterranean, then a boat with over 800 refugees capsized — and only 28 survived. Continue reading

Source and Image:

• Spiegel Online

He sits in a migrant detention centre in Zawya, Libya, surrounded by hundreds of fellow asylum seekers who nearly died this week at sea.

They survived only after being intercepted, detained and brought back to shore by Libyan coastguards, ending a week in which they went round in circles, starving and utterly lost.

But despite their horror stories, Abdallah, 21, says the journey that his fellow inmates barely withstood - and that killed more than 450 others this week - is his only option.

"I cannot go back to my country," says Abdallah, who is from Darfur, in Sudan. He left for what is now South Sudan in 2006, after he says his village was destroyed in the Darfur war, his father died, and his sisters raped.

But in South Sudan, another war later broke out. So he made his way through the Sahara, a journey that he says killed his brother and cousin, to Libya.

And there last year, he was witness to his third civil war in a decade - a war that still drags on, its frontline just a few miles from the camp at Zawya.

"There is a war in my country, there's no security, no equality, no freedom," Abdallah says. "But if I stay here, it's just like my country. There is no security, there is violence. When you work, they take your money."

He worked in a soap shop, and saved up to pay local smugglers for the boat to Europe. But just as he hoped to complete the payment, he was robbed, and then arrested.

The recounting of his ordeal brings out first the tears, and then a conclusion: "I need to go to Europe." Continue reading

Source and Image:

• The Guardian