Days of Pride and Grief in Yerevan: ADFA joins leaders and witnesses at the Republic of Armenia Prayer Breakfast
3 October 2026, Yerevan, Armenia.
We arrived in Yerevan carrying pride and grief at once.
The Republic of Armenia Prayer Breakfast, which closed today, came only days after the anniversaries of the 44-Day War, which began on Sept. 27, 2020, and of the ethno-religious cleansing of Armenians from Artsakh, or Nagorno-Karabakh, in 2023.
We know those years well. In 2020, and again in 2023, we helped people in need, working alongside partners including Transparent Charity NGO. We wrote about the plight of the Armenian people in Newsweek, Global Bar Magazine and Axess. This week, we came back for a different reason: to take part in the conversation.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan delivered the keynote. Among the speakers who followed was Capt. Barry "Butch" Wilmore (U.S. Navy, Ret.), who retired from NASA last year after 464 days in space.
ADFA founder Nuri Kino was one of the invited speakers. In 15 minutes, he made the case that ADFA is proof the fight is worth fighting. He described how social media can build an international network, and how that network can shape what the world's major news outlets publish. Those stories, in turn, reach world leaders. The speech was well received.
It was a privilege to share what we have learned, and the contacts we have built, with people from so many countries. Listening was worth just as much. We heard from survivors of persecution, from witnesses, and from politicians and diplomats, among them speakers from Sudan, Syria and Nigeria. We carry their stories home.
We exchanged a few words with Prime Minister Pashinyan, and with people from the White House, the U.S. State Department and their counterparts abroad. We met representatives of the Armenian Apostolic Church and other Armenian churches, and church leaders and human rights advocates from Syria, Nigeria and many other countries. We also spent valuable time with Asif Mahmood and CeCe Heil, chair and vice chair of USCIRF, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
In his second address, at the Opera House on Saturday, Oct. 3, the prime minister named Assyrians/Syriacs, Yazidis and other minorities as communities recognized by the Armenian state, and said they are well integrated into society. We missed the Assyrian Church of the East in Armenia, and we hope to see it represented next time.
Our work began with giving a voice to Assyrians/Chaldeans/Syriacs. Today it also reaches other Indigenous peoples and minorities, and we serve as first responders in times of crisis, from the earthquake from the war in Ukraine to the earthquake in Turkey.
A prayer breakfast is a modest format. People sit together, listen and pray. But in a part of the world where faith has so often marked people for persecution, listening matters. The stories we heard in Yerevan deserve to travel further. That is the work we go home to.
Our warm thanks to the organizers of the Republic of Armenia Prayer Breakfast and to Stepan Sargsyan, chair of the organizing committee, for the invitation and for several meaningful days in Yerevan.
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