Persecution of Christians in muslim countries

waltky · Mar 20, 2013

'People Turned On Christians' After Iraq Invasion...

'People turned on Christians': Persecuted Iraqi minority reflects on life after Saddam
20 Mar.`13 -- Rana stepped out of church in Baghdad in December 2006 to find an envelope wedged against her car windshield. Inside was a bullet -- a message that meant she and her family were next on an assassins list.

They fled the city the next day, leaving behind a business, a home -- everything. "I didn't like Saddam Hussein, but he didn't bother the Christians," said Rana, 29, after a church service in London. "He was a dictator. When he went, the gangs came from everywhere." Rana isnt alone: Bombings, kidnappings and generalized violence unleashed by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that toppled Hussein caused hundreds of thousands of Christians to flee their homeland.

While there is no centralized source of information on the number of Christians who have left Iraq, it is estimated that there were 2 million there in the 1990s. That number has fallen to between 200,000 to 500,000 today, according to church leaders. Rana, who like others interviewed would not give her last name because of fear for the safety of relatives still in Iraq, is now part of a congregation that worships at Holy Trinity Brook Green, a Roman Catholic church in West London.

The congregants -- Syriac Catholics whose services are conducted in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus -- are part of the estimated 2,500 Iraqi Christians thought to live in the U.K. In a pew near Rana sat Wasseem, a 26-year-old who arrived in the U.K. five months ago. The murder of his friend Rariq haunts him, Wasseem said through a translator. Rariq, also a Christian, was a driver for American forces in Baghdad and was kidnapped on his way to meet Wasseem. Rariqs dismembered body was returned to his family five days later.

Wasseem received a handwritten death threat himself. Terrified, he decided to stay in his village in northern Iraq, he said. While safe, the predominantly Christian area offered no jobs, and he soon fled the country. Extremists haven't targeted only individual Christians and their families. On Oct. 31, 2010, gunmen stormed Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad during Sunday Mass, taking more than a hundred hostages. When security forces tried to free those held, the attackers detonated explosives. At least 58 people were killed, including two priests.

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Persecution of Christians in muslim countries

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