IRAQ As attacks increase, Christians try to flee

About 2,000 families have recently tried to leave Iraq, a group estimates.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- It was 10:30 in the morning, almost four months ago, and the children were getting ready for church. Aziz Raad Azzo, 5, 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."
Choice
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," said 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 to 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 said. "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.
Not talking
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," said 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," said 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 said, 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."
Hatred
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," said 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.
Kidnappings
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 cell phone. "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," said 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."