Church bombing in Baghdad ANTHONY O’MAHONY


aghdad’s Syrian Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of Deliverance (Sayidat al-Najat) is close by the heavily for- tified Green Zone of the city, home to foreign embassies and the Iraqi Government. But that didn’t stop the men with automatic weapons and suicide vests striding up to the church in the Karrada dis- trict of the city on Sunday evening. It was 5.30 p.m. when the group, belonging to the Sunni-oriented “Islamic State of Iraq’ and affiliated to al-Qaeda, moved into the church. Inside, the congregation would have been listening to the rich liturgical texts of their Mass in Arabic and Syrian. Moments before, a car bomb exploded out- side the semi-fortified church gates. Inside, about 100 people were herded to the centre of the church by the gunmen while around 60 others were ushered to a small room at the back of the church by a priest. The attackers demanded the release of al- Qaeda prisoners, including the widow of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the former head of the Islamic State of Iraq – an umbrella grouping of Iraqi insurgents set up in 2006 – who was killed in April, and posted a statement on radical Islamic websites demanding the release of Muslim girls from Christian backgrounds who they claimed were being held prisoner by the Coptic Orthodox Church in monasteries in Egypt.


From cradle to grave B


Christianity in Iraq is as old as the New Testament itself. But now its very existence there is threatened by confessional violence, such as that in Baghdad, that has led to a growing exodus of believers


The siege ended after hours of taunting the congregation with anti-Christian polemic and threats to blow up the church when Iraqi and United States military surrounded the build- ing in a second wave of violence. Of the three priests who were leading the service, two were killed – Fr Wasim Sabieh, who was only 27 years old, and Fr Thaier Saad Abdal, while the third, Fr Qatin, died later in hospital. Vatican Radio reported on Monday that 42 hostages were killed including seven children, 56 wounded including eight children. During the assault, seven members of the security services were killed and 15 wounded; of the attackers most had been reported killed or died as they exploded their suicide belts, although some may have been captured. This was not the first time that the Cathedral of Our Lady of Deliverance or other Catholic churches have been targeted in Iraq, but its savagery – the death toll in this attack was the highest of any massacre of Iraqi Catholics – marks a watershed and will no doubt further destabilise Christian presence in Iraq. Benedict XVI, in an address in St Peter’s Square on Monday, the Solemnity of All Saints, said that he is praying “for the victims of this absurd violence, which is even more ferocious as it struck defenceless persons, gathered in the house of God, which is a house of love and reconciliation”. The Pope will have in mind that the Synod for the Middle East,


Attacks on Christians in Iraq since 2003


■ 1 August 2004, car bombings in Baghdad and Mosul, killing 12 people and wounding others, both Christians and Muslims, on six Christian churches. ■January 2005, Syrian Catholic Archbishop Basile Georges Casmoussa of Mosul kidnapped from his archdiocese. Subsequently released soon after, following reported pressure from the Vatican and other Middle Eastern states. ■October 2006, Syrian Orthodox priest Boulos Iskander snatched in Mosul and beheaded some months later. ■ June 2007, Ragheed Ganni, a Chaldean priest, shot dead in his church along with three companions. ■ January 2008, three Chaldean and Assyrian churches in Mosul, two churches in Kirkuk and four in Baghdad are bombed. ■February 2008, Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahh kidnapped and his body found in shallow grave. ■April 2008, Fr Adel Youssef, an Assyrian Church of the East priest, shot dead by unknown assailants. ■ Early 2010, at least 10 Christians die in a two-week spate of attacks in northern city of Mosul including the bombing of a school bus. ■ 31 October 2010, 45 people, including three priests, killed during siege of Our Lady of Deliverance Cathedral, Baghdad.


4 | THE TABLET | 6 November 2010


Fr Wasim Sabieh, who died in the


attack on Baghdad’s Syrian


Catholic cathedral


originally convoked due to the crisis and suf- fering of Iraqi Christians, had closed only a week since, marked by what one observer called a “realism of hope”. Since the invasion in April 2003 and the toppling of the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein, half of all Christians in Iraq have either left the country or are refugees in neigh- bouring states, in particular Jordan, Syria and Turkey. Baghdad, which until recently had a very high concentration of Christians in the Middle East, some 250,000-300,000, has lost half that number, leaving the rest in an extremely weak position while also making the country’s Sunni-Shia fault line even more stark, with dangerous consequences. Targeting of Christian leaders as well as places of worship has increased, with some 50 churches attacked and many more closed since 2003. The original cradle of Syrian Catholicism


was Turkey, particularly the province of Tur Abdin (the Syrian Catholic Patriarchate was at Mardin, close to the modern border with Syria, for most of the nineteenth century), but today this is no more than a memory, and the 2,500 Syrian Catholics who have remained in Turkey are mostly in Istanbul. During the First World War, up to 100,000 Syrian Catholics were massacred by Turkish nationalists and many of those who survived fled to the ancient lands of Assyria, in the north of what is now Iraq, above all in Mosul. The main Syrian Catholic homeland today is Iraq (with around 65,000) and Syria-Lebanon (with some 80,000), with small communities in Egypt and the Holy Land. However, they are only the third largest Christian community in Iraq after the Chaldean Catholics and the Church of the East. The political weakness of the small numbers of Syrian Christians has encouraged some Assyrian nationalists to seek a separate Christian enclave in the north of Iraq, in a buffer between the Kurdish region and the Sunni central belt, but the Catholic Church leadership of Iraq have not supported this idea. However, scholars of the Syrian


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