Facing extinction? Christians Praying at St. Joseph's, a Chaldean church in Baghdad

As we approach Christmas, Christians in Iraq are wondering whether they’d have been better off under Saddam. This answer, remarkably, is almost certainly yes:

It could be a scene from a Victorian Christmas card. The young people gather in the church, decorating a tree, while in the background the choir rehearses for Christmas Day — the tune of God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen playing out.

In the theatre next to the church two clowns are playing musical chairs with hundreds of children, while a bishop and an inflatable Father Christmas look on.

The words to the carol are in Iraqi-accented Arabic — Feltestereh qolubikum, ya ayuha al jumoor — “may your hearts take comfort, you who are gathered here”. The church is Our Lady of Deliverance Syriac Catholic Church in Baghdad, and outside is the more familiar Iraqi scene of barbed wire and armed guards. Behind the tinsel and carols lies a fear that Christians in Iraq are a community under threat of extinction. Proportionally more Christians are leaving Iraq than any other group.

Last week 100 Christian leaders and politicians of all religions held an emergency meeting just before fresh violence broke out in the northern city of Mosul, with attacks on churches and Christian schools. On Tuesday a baby was killed and 40 people, including schoolchildren, were injured in three simultaneous bombings. Two days ago a Christian man was shot dead as he travelled to work.

“It is terrible,” said Fadi, 26, an electricity worker from Mosul who asked that his real name not be used. “Most of the Christians are staying at home, or when they go out they watch their backs.” In late 2008, killings of Christians in Mosul by insurgent groups left 40 dead and 12,000 fleeing their homes. Fadi reeled off a string of recent, smaller-scale attacks against Christians, fearful that the same level of violence would return.

Christians in Kirkuk, also in the north, have been kidnapped in recent months and as tension increases before elections they fear the attacks will multiply.

Some blame the attacks on insurgents, including al-Qaeda, who are still active in Mosul, while others accuse Kurdish or Arab factions fighting over territory. Although they differ on who is responsible, almost everyone responds by fleeing. Gorgis Mettis, from the Yazidi ethnic minority, lives in Bartella, a Christian-dominated village near Mosul, and said that after a week of violence, many Christian families were seeking refuge in his town. “You cannot live in Mosul,” he said. “Every day you find Christians being killed.”

He estimated that since 2003 three quarters of Christians had left Mosul, historically the centre of the ancient Chaldo-Assyrian Christianity practised in Iraq. “Very few are still going to church. The women have to wear hijabs. They send someone first in a car to check if there is someone outside the church,” he said.

The problem, William Warda, a Christian and human-rights campaigner based in Baghdad, said, was that although security in Iraq as a whole has improved, during the worst of the violence hundreds of thousands of Christians fled to their ancestral homeland in the north — now the country’s most volatile area.

Those left in Baghdad, which had a large community before the war, still face attacks, however. The district of Dora, which has suffered greatly from sectarian fighting, had 4,000 Christian families in 2003. Almost all have left and have not returned.A Human Rights Watch report released last monthy said that two thirds of the million Christians in Iraq in 2003had now left their homes. About half of those had left the country.

At Our Lady of Deliverance yesterday, Manal Matloub, 30, stepped back to admire the tree as its lights were switched on. Difficult times, she said, “definitely made us stronger”.

The priest, Father Waseem Sabeeh, said: “Christians are a special case, they are not weak but they have a proverb about love your neighbour, and that can be interpreted as weakness. As a church, we reject guns.”

But there are armed men at the gates of the church. “We cannot bring back the people who have left,” he added, “but we can try to keep those who are here,” he said.

“Fight those who believe not in God nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by God and His Apostle, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth , (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” Qur’an 9:29

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