A people bleeding to death
For centuries, those familiar with the Middle East have been impressed by the level of education in Iraq. However, since the reign of political and religious fanaticism, a tragedy on a huge scale has been unfolding between the Euphrates and the Tigris. A large proportion of the country’s elite has defected. Today over a million displaced people live in Syria and Jordan alone. The violence continues to reach new peaks.
After the last Iraq war, AVC started by supporting a church whose pastor had had contact with AVC for a long time previously. For thirty days he had been locked up in one of Saddam Hussein’s death cells from which few ever escaped. As if by a miracle, he went free. Today his church enjoys significant growth. God seems to be at work here.
Confronting the effects of hatred and murder
Reconstruction of schools and kindergartens
AVC has contributed to the reconstruction of some of Iraq’s many schools and kindergartens destroyed in the war. One of the local partners here has a talent for professionally restoring run-down buildings on a low budget. In this way, many new friends have been made in Baghdad and in the north of the country.
Refugee support
Since 2007, AVC / NEHEMIA have been helping particularly needy Iraqi refugee families.
Almost all of them have a harrowing life story marked by violence, murder, escape, poverty and... renewed hopelessness.
Without this support, the scale of which is only made possible with the help of the German Department for Foreign Affairs, there would very likely have been many more deaths from starvation, suicide or as a result of disease.
- Food distribution for refugees with the support of the German Department for Foreign Affairs
Help for persecuted Christians
In the north of Iraq, too, hatred and murder are rampant. Since the autumn of 2008, Christians and ethnic minorities in particular have been brutally driven out of Mosul. Several hundred have been shot dead or positively executed simply because they were, for example, wearing a cross around their neck or had a Christian first name.
With the help of the Department for Foreign Affairs, AVC / Nehemia have launched an aid project for over 2000 displaced people who, without support, would have been forced to join the exodus out of Iraq.
