Christian Science Monitor
July 12 2004

Iraq’s Christians consider fleeing as attacks on them rise

By Annia Ciezadlo | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

BAGHDAD – It was 10:30 in the morning, almost four months ago, and
the children were getting ready for church. Aziz Raad Azzo, 5 years
old, was drinking his milk; his 14-year-old sister Raneen was putting
on her new clothes. When they heard a car pull up, Raneen, thinking
her father was home, ran to the window and flung open the shutters.
Four men shot her and her little brother in the head.
The children’s crime: Their father, a Christian storekeeper, had sold
alcohol.

Before the murders, the family received a photocopied death threat.
“We are warning you, the enemies of God and Islam, from selling
alcohol again, and unless you stop we will kill you and send you to
hell where a worse fate awaits you,” reads the warning, signed by
“Harakat Ansar al-Islam,” the Partisans of Islam Movement.

Shortly after the murders, their father wrote a letter to an Iraqi
human rights group. “Please save me,” he begged, “and help me leave
the country.”

Facing a rising tide of persecution, Iraq’s tiny Christian minority
has a terrible choice: stay and risk their lives, or leave and
abandon those left behind. Afraid of an Islamic future in which they
would be outcasts, thousands are trying to flee. “It’s like a huge
amount of people lined up at the starting line, waiting for the gun
to go off, and now it’s going off,” says the Rev. Ken Joseph, an
Iraqi-American Christian activist in Baghdad. “For them to leave is a
very big step, but that shows how badly people want to get out.”

It is difficult to gauge the exodus, because most Christian groups,
desperately wanting Christians to stay, deny that there is any
problem. (Iraq’s new minister of displacement and migration, Pascale
Isho Warda, was in Europe and unavailable for comment.) But Issaq
Issaq, director of international relations for the Assyrian
Democratic Movement, estimates that about 2,000 families have tried
to leave since summer began. “They want to leave, because they heard
they can get asylum in Australia,” he says. “We are trying to keep
these people in Iraq, because it is their country.”

In 1987, the Iraqi census showed about 1.4 million Christians. Then
came Saddam Hussein’s anfal (“spoils of war’) campaign. In the late
1980s, the army rampaged through the country’s north, attacking
ethnic Kurds and systematically destroying more than 100 small
Christian villages, razing scores of ancient monasteries and churches
and deporting thousands of Christian families to Baghdad.

During the 1990s, a steady stream of Christians poured out of Iraq to
Canada, Switzerland, Australia, and the United States – wherever they
could get asylum. Today, fewer than 1 million remain in Iraq, divided
among Assyrians, Chaldean Catholics, Armenians, and Syriac
Christians.

In this dwindling community, talk of persecution is taboo. Those who
admit to it are accused of helping the terrorists. “Newspapers
publish this kind of thing in order to make propaganda, and scare the
Christians into leaving the country,” says the priest at the Sacred
Heart Catholic church in central Baghdad. He begged not to have his
name published. But he swears there is no Muslim-Christian hostility.

“We are brothers,” says the priest, sweating inside the stifling
rectory. “There is always this sympathy, and this tie of brotherhood
between the Christians and the Muslims. Baghdad is considered a
center of Christianity.”

Outside the church, under the punishing 120-degree sun, the priest’s
bodyguard laughs. “Don’t believe what our father said,” he says,
pointing out a fresh bullet hole next to the rectory door and
reciting a litany of recent death threats. “He can go anywhere he
likes, he can leave the country if he wants to. But he is not
thinking about us, the poor Christians. That’s why he doesn’t want me
to talk to you frankly and openly about this…. There is an
immigration bureau in Syria, and most of the Christians are going
there.”

Ten minutes away, in the Bab Sharji market, Ahmed al-Maamouri scorns
Christian claims of brotherhood.

“I am unhappy about them, because Iraq is our country,” says the
young Muslim merchant. “They are like a white termite: They are
eating the country from the inside. But if they hear a loud voice,
they will keep quiet. The Christians are cowards – they are not going
to fight.”

Attacks have increased. Saturday, Islamic militants in Mosul and
Baquba blew up four liquor stores. Sunday, fanatics attacked a liquor
store in downtown Baghdad, shouting “God is great” as they
machine-gunned bottles of beer and wine and kidnapped an employee.

Not all Christians are killed by Islamic militants. Issaq has
compiled a list of 102 Christians killed since April 9, 2003. Some
were killed for selling alcohol; others for working with Americans as
translators or laundresses. (About 10 percent were killed by
coalition troops, casualties of postwar violence.) Many were
kidnapped and killed for money, a fate that befalls Muslims, too.

But sometimes it’s hard to separate kidnappings from religious
murders. Among Iraqis, there’s a widespread belief that Christians
are wealthy. This stereotype, too, can kill. On June 2, gangs
kidnapped a young Christian storekeeper named Saher Faraj Mirkhai.
Thinking he was rich, the gang demanded a ransom of $100,000. After
selling their furniture, his 16-year-old truck, and the stock of his
downtown Baghdad store, his family scraped together all the money
they could find: about $13,500.

After they paid, the family got a phone call from Saher’s cellphone.
“We asked for $100,000, and you paid this miserable amount of money,”
said the voice, cursing them with foul language. The next day, police
found Saher’s body, pierced by over 30 bullets and severely
mutilated.

Because of their religion, and the fact that many Christians speak
English or have relatives abroad, there’s also a widespread
perception that Christians are pro-American.

“There is a common ground between them and the Americans, so it was
very easy for them to work with the Americans,” says Khaled Abed, a
Muslim street peddler who believes that “about 40 percent” of
Christians work for occupation forces. “So you could say that the
Christians used the current situation for their own benefit.”

Like many others, Mr. Maamouri, the Muslim merchant, sees Christians
as sympathetic to the American occupiers. “When the Americans invaded
Iraq, they thought God had delivered them,” he says. “They think that
this is their day.”

The peace between Christians and Muslims in Iraq, ever fragile, has
always cracked in the crucible of national crisis. In 1931, as the
British Empire handed over Iraq to a “sovereign” government of its
choosing, the country’s Assyrian Christian minority begged for a
protected enclave or permission to migrate en masse. The British
rejected both, offering them a deal instead: Assyrian soldiers could
guard Britain’s air bases inside Iraq.

This illusory British “protection” proved fatal. In July 1933, a band
of armed Assyrians tried to flee into neighboring Syria, and a border
skirmish erupted. Iraqi authorities portrayed it as a full-blown
insurrection by an Assyrian fifth column trying to bring back their
imperialist protectors. That summer, Iraqi troops and armed Kurdish
tribesmen led a massacre against Assyrians, culminating in the
slaughter of hundreds of helpless Assyrian villagers on August 11. On
their return to Baghdad, a cheering populace showered the troops with
rose water and pelted them with flowers for their victory in crushing
the Assyrian “revolt.”

Today, Assyrians are again asking for a protected province in the
north, as well as money to fund a hotline and three safe houses for
victims of anti-Christian crimes. “If we can get a zone in the north
of Iraq, the rest of Iraq is going to go to hell, but we can be
safe,” says Mr. Joseph. “Otherwise, Chicago and San Diego and Detroit
had better get ready for another flood of Assyrian refugees.”

About a month ago, a rumor tore through Baghdad’s Christian
community, half a million strong, that Australia had agreed to give
Christians political asylum. Frantic asylum-seekers flooded passport
offices and churches trying to get copies of their baptismal
certificates.

Salwan, who asked that his last name not be published, was one of
them. On June 19, he took a $10 taxi from Baghdad to Damascus. The
next morning, he went to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees office
on Maliki Street. On the sidewalk, hundreds of Iraqis waited in line.
Most had slept there overnight, hoping to get in and register as
refugees.

Salwan, a moonfaced young businessman, had already camped out
overnight on the pavement twice. Each time, the office closed before
he reached the head of the line. This time, he talked his way to the
head of the line and got his prize: an official UNHCR document noting
that he is an Armenian Catholic and giving him six months to apply
for refugee status.

Now back in Baghdad, he says he loves Iraq, but he is hoping the UN
will call him and tell him he can go to Australia: “Because of the
situation, and because all my family is there, and because I cannot
bear the life here anymore.”