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Baghdad: three lives under duress
In different neighborhoods, a shopkeeper, a Christian, and an imam try to carry on amid daily dangers.
from the May 22, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 4
Dora's Christians
The Dora area of southern Baghdad, a neighborhood of low-slung houses the same color as the khaki earth around them, was always a place where different sectarian populations, including a sizable Christian community, lived easily side-by-side.
That began changing in 2005. Most of the pressure of neighborhood cleansing fell on local Shiites, who at first lost the freedom to invite other Shiites to visit their homes, and then began to leave themselves as they faced increasingly antagonistic Sunni neighbors.
But as bad as things were for Shiites, they were even more frightening for the Christians of Dora, who make up a much smaller slice of the neighborhood.
Still, nothing prepared Peter Youash, a Christian who has hung on, for the flyers, the strange messengers, even the envelopes containing one bullet – the sign that one is targeted for death – that began showing up on the doorsteps of Dora's Christian residents. The demand: Either convert to Islam, pay $3,000 per person, leave the neighborhood – or face death.
"I felt I was back maybe in the time of World War II; it seemed this couldn't be happening in Baghdad, but it was very real," says Mr. Youash, whose name has been changed for security reasons. (Conversations with him were held by e-mail and telephone, because he said it would be unsafe for a Western journalist to visit him.)
Dora has repeatedly been "taken back" from Sunni insurgents, each time with pronouncements of success from Iraqi and US military officials. But so far, the insurgents, fortified with weapons delivered from their strongholds south of Baghdad in the "triangle of death," have always come back. US forces on patrol take sniper fire on a daily basis.
Youash says he has watched as perhaps three-fourths of Dora's Christians have fled. This month, the US Commission on Religious Freedom in Washington reported that at least half of Iraq's Christians have left the country. The Christian population reached 1.4 million in the 1980s, according to an Iraq census, and declined in the 1990s in the face of persecution. It was fewer than 1 million in 2004, before a large postwar exodus began.
The commission report says that Christians face terror tactics from Al Qaeda-associated forces as well as "marginalization and prejudice" from the Shiite-led government.
The US military says the emphasis of the surge on more neighborhood patrols is turning the tide in Dora, but Youash says he's unsure if the old days of a peaceful mixed neighborhood will ever return. He says he finds no reason to believe Iraqi authorities will help that happen.
"A few days ago, the parents of a friend filled a pickup with what they could and left Dora," he says. "They were stopped by an Iraqi Army patrol [that] insulted them. One of the insults [was] that 'you Christians are dirty and you don't deserve to live.' Then they took some of their stuff" before allowing the family to move on.
"Now," Youash, says, "they are out of Baghdad."
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