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  • Christian minority targeted in Iraq

    Los Angeles Daily News, CA
    Aug 2 2004

    Christian minority targeted in Iraq

    By Somini Sengupta and Ian Fisher
    The New York Times


    BAGHDAD, Iraq -- In the first significant attacks against Iraq's
    Christian minority since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's
    government, assailants staged a series of coordinated car bombings
    Sunday evening near four churches in Baghdad and another in the
    northern city of Mosul.

    In Baghdad, at least 11 people, including two children, were killed
    in the explosions timed to coincide with Sunday evening Mass, and at
    least 20 people were injured, witnesses and hospital officials said.
    One person died in the Mosul attack, and seven people were injured,
    according to a U.S. military report.

    At least one church, in a lively Christian enclave in the Karrada
    neighborhood of downtown Baghdad, was struck as the priest was giving
    Communion. Next door, a Muslim family of five was killed by the
    blast, which was powerful enough to rip a row of bricks from the
    building's top floor and shatter the windows inside a courtyard well
    down the block. A hospital official said a Muslim passerby also was
    killed in one of the blasts.

    "It is a crime," Monsignor Raphael Kutemi said in front of the
    rectory of the Syrian Catholic church, Notre Dame of Deliverance. "It
    is Sunday, and we were in prayer."

    The bombings Sunday seemed to mark another turning point in the
    already terrifying violence that has wracked Iraq since the U.S.-led
    invasion last year.

    Even in this long-secular capital city, a growing tide of Islamist
    extremism since the fall of Saddam's government has shuttered liquor
    stores, often owned by Christians, and beauty salons and compelled
    women and girls to cover their heads. It was not clear if the attacks
    on the churches were an extension of fundamentalist fervor or a
    calculated escalation by insurgents who have shown a willingness to
    broaden their attacks, even on fellow Muslims, in their fight against
    the U.S. presence here and the new interim Iraqi government.

    A few minutes before the Syrian Catholic church was struck, another
    car bomb exploded in front of the nearby Armenian church as Mass was
    under way. And inside a seminary compound in the south Baghdad
    neighborhood of Doura, two cars loaded with explosives blew up. A
    fourth explosion was set off across town in an enclave called New
    Baghdad when a car carrying explosives crashed into the car in front
    of it and blew up yards from a Catholic church but in front of a
    mosque.

    Across Baghdad, the evening sky was laced with plumes of thick black
    smoke. U.S. military helicopters hovered over the blast sites. The
    smell of charred metal lingered in the air long after the fires were
    extinguished and darkness fell.

    About the same time Sunday evening, in Mosul, about 220 miles north
    of Baghdad, parishioners were coming out of a Catholic church Mass
    when a car bomb detonated. A U.S. military report said the blast was
    caused by a bomb in a four-door Toyota Supra.

    Meanwhile, the fate of seven foreign truck drivers taken hostage last
    week remained uncertain.

    Agence France-Presse quoted a Kenyan government official in Nairobi
    as saying that all seven -- three Kenyans, three Indians and an
    Egyptian -- had been freed. But neither the Kuwaiti company that
    employed them nor the Muslim sheik who has tried to negotiate for
    their release could confirm this. In fact, the sheik, Hisham
    al-Dulaymi, said Sunday evening that the hostage-takers, who call
    themselves the Bearers of the Black Banners, had warned him in a
    letter that they were prepared to behead their captives.

    Al-Dulaymi said he would not take part in any more negotiations,
    saying that he believed the kidnappers would, as threatened, begin
    executing hostages soon.

    "They are going to carry out their threat," he said Sunday afternoon,
    showing the letter in a plain brown envelope, which he said was sent
    to him by insurgents signaling that the negotiations for the
    hostages' freedom had ended in failure.

    He said the hostages' employer, Kuwait Gulf and Link Transport, had
    refused to furnish what the kidnappers described as compensation
    money for those killed during clashes with U.S. troops in the western
    insurgency hotbed of Fallujah. He refused to specify how much the
    kidnappers demanded, but it was a suggestion nonetheless of
    less-than-ideological imperatives driving the hostage-taking.

    Reuters, citing a Lebanese Foreign Ministry official, reported that
    on Sunday Iraqi soldiers freed a Lebanese citizen who had been seized
    in a separate hostage-taking. The fate of another Lebanese, taken
    captive with a Syrian driver on Friday, remained unclear.

    Earlier on Sunday, a suicide car bomber raced to a police station in
    Mosul and blew up his vehicle, killing at least five and wounding 53,
    U.S. military officials said. In Baghdad early in the morning,
    another car bomb killed three and injured three others.

    The Sunday strikes followed overnight clashes between U.S. troops and
    insurgents in Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad, in which 10 people
    were killed, the U.S. military said.

    The church bombings struck a singular note in the history of the
    15-month insurgency. It is the first time since the March 2003
    invasion that Christians, who represent less than 5 percent of the
    country's 24 million citizens, have come under fire in such a direct
    way. Guerrillas have largely directed their wrath toward Iraqi
    government representatives and law enforcement officials, as well as
    foreign workers, translators and anyone else accused of collaborating
    with the 140,000-strong U.S. troop presence here.

    But the U.S.-led invasion unleashed Islamist hardliners, long
    suppressed during Saddam's rule. In Baghdad, a militia loyal to the
    radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has been blamed for many of the
    attacks against the largely Christian-owned liquor stores. At the
    same time, the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been
    accused by U.S. officials of assembling a core of Sunni Muslim
    extremists, some from outside Iraq, to foment sectarian violence.

    Sunday's coordinated strikes sent shock waves among ordinary
    Christians and Muslims alike.

    "Never, I'm never going to church again on Sunday," said Khawla Yawo
    Odishah, who had escaped the bombing because a family medical
    emergency had caused her to miss Mass.

    As darkness fell, Odishah, 50, lingered across the street from the
    compound of St. Peter Seminary in Doura, where two car bombs blew up,
    torching several other cars and filling the night air with the heat
    and stench of burning metal. This was the Mass many of her friends
    usually attended, she said.

    Faris Talis, a Muslim, said he was in his tire repair store Sunday
    evening when the first car bomb exploded on the street, spattering
    bits of glass and metal. He said he looked up to see a man, who he
    believes was involved in the attack, run into the seminary's parking
    lot. Then the second blast went off inside the seminary compound. He
    ran inside to help what he said were scores of injured and dead.

    "I am a Muslim and I was evacuating them," he said. "I feel terrible
    about this. Whatever did this is a criminal. He doesn't have any
    mercy in his heart."

    In the seminary parking lot, about a dozen cars sat scorched and
    smoking just inside the front wall, at least one tipped up on its
    side. Glass, ash and car parts were strewn around the lot, about 50
    yards from the main building. Heat radiated off the blackened metal,
    as several men carried a blanket to one of the cars, apparently to
    retrieve the body of someone who had been trapped inside.

    In the Karada neighborhood in central Baghdad, worshippers had
    gathered for Mass at the Armenian church, when, according to one
    witness, a Volkswagen Passat pulled up and exploded. The engine flew
    200 feet and landed in the street. Flames raced to the sky in front
    of the church.

    Minutes later, a few blocks away, a second explosion erupted in front
    of the Syrian Catholic church, sending people running, engulfed in
    smoke.

    Safaa Michael, who was at the service, heard the first explosion.
    When the second blast came, "all the glass fell down over our heads."
    There were blood stains on his temple.

    The church went suddenly dark. The explosion had cut the electricity.

    Zaid Gazee Al-Janabi, 30, a security guard and a Muslim who lives
    down the street, watched the bomb blow off the roof of a house next
    to the church. He pulled five bodies, including those of two
    children, from the ground floor. They were Muslims. They were his
    friends.

    Fadel Aziz, 38, a Christian businessman who lives on the block, said
    he watched as the car exploded in front of him. Glass shattered along
    the block and a hunk of blackened metal careened into his yard. "It
    was very big," he said. He said he saw six or seven injured, and
    helped two of them into his house. Like many others, he blamed the
    carnage on foreigners.

    "We have lived with Muslims for thousands of years," he said.
    "Nothing like this ever happened before. They cannot be Iraqis. They
    came to make trouble in the country."
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