Globe Trot: Iraqi forces move on Mosul, liberating 12 Nineveh villages

IRAQ: Overnight, Iraqi army forces began an operation to liberate Mosul from ISIS, which has held the country’s second largest city since June 2014. According to Archimandrite Emanuel Youkhana, an Assyrian church cleric and head of the Iraqi relief group CAPNI, the battle by Kurdish peshmerga and other Iraqi contingents to retake surrounding Nineveh Plains “may go fast and easy,” as those forces advanced 6 miles in a few hours, liberating 12 villages east of Mosul. In these areas, Youkhana reported, ISIS is collapsing and showing very little defense.

EGYPT: Hillary Clinton’s hacked and released emails show official disdain for religious groups in the United States, but legally obtained emails through the Freedom of Information Act show Clinton taking that show on the road. An inside memo praised the 2012 election of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi in Egypt and pledged American security and financial assistance, even as a top Clinton aide informed her, “The defining mission of the Muslim Brotherhood is the implementation of sharia,” or strict Islamic law.

TURKEY: American church workers Andrew and Norine Brunson remain in Turkish detention, threatened with deportation. According to one report, “Someone got a peek at them through a window. They are together and in a comfortable place. Norine waved and smiled.”

NIGERIA: The 21 released Chibok schoolgirls describe a harsh enslavement, but like several others who escaped before them, “are in the custody of the secret police,” according to this report. According to human rights lawyer Emmanuel Ogebe, “The girls were reunited with their families today and it is unlikely the parents will agree to the government keeping their daughters.

Most importantly, wrote Obege, “the girls replaced their hijabs with regular modest head scarfs for Christian women and clutching their Bibles, sang and danced praise choruses today in the Nigerian capital. It was certainly one of the most beautiful sights I have beheld.” Nearly 200 Chibok girls remain in Boko Haram captivity.

THAILAND: Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world’s longest ruling king, modeled how a monarchy may offer cohesion where other systems fail.

Mark Tooley noted in Providence magazine that Fisher Ames once observed: “A monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom, whilst a republic is a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always in water.”

TODAY: I look forward to speaking in chapel (streamed live online) at Cedarville University on the situation for Christians in the Middle East.