Four Missionaries of Charity nuns of Mother Teresa were among those assassinated at a retirement home in Aden, Yemen.
Tanenbaum condemns yesterday’s massacre at a Catholic retirement home in Aden, Yemen. There, “visitors” asked to see their mother before storming facility, tying up employees and executing 16 of them in the community garden. Four Missionaries of Charity nuns of Mother Teresa were among those assassinated along with nurses, guards and staff.
“We are disgusted and saddened by the violence that continues to plague Yemen’s families and communities,” noted Tanenbaum CEO Joyce Dubensky. “The retirement home is Catholic and was originally established through Mother Teresa’s charitable works. So, there seems little question that – once again – religion played a role in the assailants’ decision to target this home for the elderly.”
In less than a year, a Catholic cemetery in Yemen has been vandalized, a church set ablaze and an abandoned church exploded.[1] Dubensky sadly acknowledged, “Christians are being targeted amid the tragic civil war in Yemen, and elsewhere in the Middle East.”
Al Jazeera reports that Aden was once home to a small Christian community that left the region “long ago.” Today, Yemen has descended into a civil war between the Iran-backed Houthis and a coalition led by Saudi Arabia to reinstate Yemen’s government. Long-standing tribal conflicts and attacks committed by terrorist organizations, such as the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, further destabilize the region. Communities and hospitals lack access to food, clean water, medicine and gasoline.
“At Tanenbaum, we are also holding Yemen and, in particular, our Yemeni Peacemaker Sheikh Abdulrahman Al-Marwani, in our thoughts and prayers,” Dubensky said. “One has to wonder why we are not seeing more recognition of this disaster, and why we are not doing more in Yemen and elsewhere.”
Click here to learn more about Peacemaker Sheikh Abdulrahman Al-Marwani’s work in Yemen.
[1] (Al Jazeera 2016)