Iraq's Christians consider fleeing as attacks on them rise
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.
