Lausanne World Pulse – World Pulse Archives – World Pulse Archives

Iraq’s small Christian minority fears more than American bombs. They expect to be targeted by a growing tide of Islamic militancy now being encouraged in the secularized Arab state.

Numbering less than 400,000, Iraq’s Christian community has in recent months become the object of overt discrimination by Islamist elements. The attacks have ranged from verbal abuse and graffiti campaigns to stone-throwing and even brutal assassinations.

Although Saddam Hussein initially kept religion out of Iraq’s political life, he began to encourage devotion to Islam after the 1991 Gulf War, emblazoning the Muslim slogan “God is great” on the Iraq flag and claiming descent from the family of the prophet Mohammed. Four years ago he launched a “faith campaign” to promote a revival of Islam, building scores of new mosques and religious schools across the country.

In March, local church leaders reported that anti-Christian rhetoric dominated Friday prayer sermons in Baghdad’s mosques. “Mohammed said fight the infidels with everything you have,” Abu Bakr al-Sammerai declared at the Abdel Qadr al-Gaylani mosque on March 7.

“You have some mullahs denouncing the Crusaders and the infidels from the minaret, meaning us as the Christians here,” Chaldean Bishop Shlemon Warduni protested. “The fanatics in Iraq are using it as an excuse to act against the Christians.”

Dominated by Wahhabi zealots linked to Saudi Arabia’s sect of Islam, the new breed of Iraqi Islamists have been blamed for a number of incidents and threats of violence across Iraq in the past year.

A Chaldean Catholic nun murdered on August 15 in her convent in central Baghdad had been executed in what local church sources had described as “an Algerian-style Islamist killing.” According to the medical examiner, the 70-year-old nun had been stripped naked and cruelly tortured for five hours before her throat was cut and she was beheaded.

Fellow nuns of Sister Cecilia Musha Hanna “think it was a hate crime against Christians,” according to an October 28 Newsweek magazine report. When Wahhabi Muslims built a mosque in 1998 directly across the street from the Order of the Daughters of the Sacred Heart, the nuns said, graffiti against the nuns started to appear on nearby walls, followed by rock-throwing and other difficulties.

In the northern city of Mosul, known now as a Wahhabi stronghold, local Christians also reported growing harassment of their clergy and church communities. Some 15 Christians were wounded in September when Islamist zealots stoned them coming out of church. Bishops and leading Christian families in the northern city have received letters telling them to convert to Islam, sometimes with accompanying threats, other times offering them cash rewards.

Local nuns have been subjected to such abuse that some have stopped wearing their habits, and many report that strangers on the street have ordered them to remove their crosses.

Last month, a local pastor said, he had prepared his church members to be ready to leave their homes, shops and church buildings within a half-hour’s notice. “We have hidden all our equipment, Bibles, books, computers, emptying our offices of everything of value,” he said, in case they needed to flee rapidly.

In addition, he said, many Christians in Northern Iraq’s cities were preparing to leave their houses, renting a room or finding other lodging for their families in undisclosed locations in the surrounding villages. Although local believers continued to meet for fellowship in small groups and the schools remained open, they had developed contingency plans to avoid attacks by strangers and post-war looting.

In mid-February, a Kurdish Christian was publicly assassinated in Northern Iraq by a fanatical Muslim who claimed he was “fulfilling the will of Allah” by killing an apostate from Islam. The police chief of Zakho has declared he will demand the death penalty against the arrested murderer of Ziwar Mohammed Ismaeel, who is survived by his widow and five children.

Father Youssef Tuma told Reuters news agency in March, “we pray the other party does not take it out on us or look at Christians of the East as the cause. “Prayers are all we have left,” the Iraqi priest concluded.

Iraq’s Christian community, one of the oldest in the world, has shrunk from 10 percent of the population 20 years ago to about 1.5 percent of the country’s 24 million people. The majority of the Christians are Catholic or Orthodox, with several dozen evangelical congregations located mostly in larger urban areas.