Thursday, Aug 05, 2004

Baghdad's Christian minority has been under threat a number of times in the past 16 centuries - including a massacre of Assyrians in 1933 and a bloody raid by Baghdad's Caliph in 1014.

Sunday's bombing of five churches in Baghdad and Mosul, killing over a dozen, immediately drew comparisons with the attacks on Baghdad's synagogues in 1948, which triggered the flight of Iraq's 2,500-year-old Jewish community.

But nervous Christian leaders said yesterday that while the attacks were likely to speed emigration, they had not sounded the death-knell of the ancient Christian community.

Iraq's Christians had sided with their compatriots against western invaders since the Crusades, they said, and would continue to do so. "We are Iraqi people, one people. We don't distinguish between Christian and Muslim," said Father Luis Alshabi, a Rome-educated polyglot, in the Chaldean Christian St Joseph's church in the Baghdad suburb of Karada. "We have been living together for 16 centuries. (Sunday) was very sad for Muslims also."

Caretaker Yohanna Shaya swept up the stained glass in St Peter's seminary in the southern Baghdad suburb of Dora, vowing to get the rest of his family out of Iraq after local youths jibed that Christians had got what they deserved.

"The educated said the bombing was haram, or against Islam, and came to help, but the unemployed layabouts just drove past, cheering," said Yohanna Shanam Shaya, whose three eldest children have already settled in the US and Holland. "I've become a stranger in my own country."

Iraq's 650,000-strong Christian community is depleting fast. Most of the 3m Christians of Iraqi origin now live abroad, mainly in the US and western Europe. Tens of thousands more have moved to Syria and Jordan, many crammed into tenement blocks, living on charity, banned from work and waiting for visas out of the Arab world.

Throughout 30 years of Ba'ath party rule, Christians had been treated as a privileged minority, favoured by Saddam Hussein who looked to non-Muslim minorities to buttress his regime against Islamist dissidents. A Chaldean Catholic, Tariq Aziz, was Mr Hussein's deputy prime minister and roving ambassador.

Few doubt that the rising tide of radical Islam in postwar Iraq has played a role in anti-Christian violence. Radical Muslim clerics routinely denounce not just western invaders but western influence, goading the faithful into attacks on Iraqis with western haircuts and liquor stores, which under Iraqi law were licensed to Christians only.

Samer Sorijan, a monk at Dora's Chaldean Catholic Monastery, said: "Sometimes we can't even buy our bread locally. Shopkeepers tell us to go and get it from khawalna, our cousins, the Americans."

Mainstream Muslim clerics have defended the Christians. As the interior ministry positioned police cars in church courtyards amid fears of more car-bombings, politicians and spiritual leaders, including the Shia's Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the influential Association of Muslim Scholars, condemned the attacks.

"The militants tried to sow sectarian strife among Shias and Sunnis and failed. They will not succeed to spark a civil war with the Christians," said Wilad Atta, 22, a Baghdad University student sporting a crucifix and long hair, outside the entrance to St Peter's seminary.

All Sunday's attacks were against Catholic rather than eastern orthodox churches, suggesting that Christians who owed their allegiance to Rome had become targets in the anti-western campaign, Catholic clerics said.

"They know we are all Catholics and that we are closer to the west than the oriental Churches," said Father Sorijan.

Others doubted that the militants were students of such theological niceties. The violent fringe of puritanical Islam, known as Wahabism, entered Iraq's Sunni Arab heartland in the 1990s from Saudi Arabia, where all churches are banned.

Assyrian Christians - an orthodox sect - have also reported a rising rate of attacks against Christian targets. Last November, a bomb was uncovered at Mosul's mainly Christian school of St Thomas, named after the Apostle who lived in the city on his way to India. And in June militants flung a grenade at Mosul's Holy Spirit Chaldean Catholic Church.

Iraqi officials blamed the Jihadi network of Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi for Sunday's attacks. The Association of Muslim Scholars - widely considered to have close ties to local insurgent groups - called the attacks "a hopeless attempt by foreigners to make our people quarrel with each other. We live and work together".

By NICOLAS PELHAM and MARK TURNER

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