Author: Aqeel Hussein in Mosul and Colin Freeman
Publication: Sunday Telegraph
Date: December 24, 2006
URL: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/24/wchrist24.xml
The snow has already settled on the mountains
further north, but the Christians of the Iraqi city of Mosul are scared to
put festive decorations outside their homes this year. Their ancestors settled
here in the 1st century AD, yet as teacher Jamal Fadi has discovered, some
of their Muslim neighbours want this Christmas to be their last.
"A letter was delivered to my door with
two bullets placed on top of it," said Mr Fadi, 32, standing watchfully
in the neat garden of his two-storey villa. "It said: 'Leave, crusaders,
or we will cut your heads off.' They want us to go from Mosul completely."
After months as a nervous bystander to the
spiralling civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims, Iraq's Christian minority
now faces the spectre of sectarian violence coming to their traditional home
city. They fear that al Qaeda-backed zealots within the Sunni community, which
forms the bulk of Mosul's one million population, want to end nearly 1,500
years of co-existence with an onslaught of ethnic cleansing.
Residents say that the campaign, which they
claim has intensified in recent weeks, is prompted by Sunni fears of a complete
Shia takeover of Baghdad in coming years. In response, Mosul would be turned
into a northern capital for a Sunni-dominated enclave, which would include
Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit and stretch south to the anti-American
towns of Fallujah and Ramadi.
The fact that no such blueprint has been endorsed
by the Iraqi government is of little comfort to Christians. The plan's architects,
they fear, are capable of enforcing it themselves through threats and indoctrination
alone. For proof, they say, look no further than playgrounds, where Christian
and Sunni Muslim children have played together for decades.
"Our children are told by other pupils
that they are 'f***ing spies' who have brought the Christian occupation to
Iraq," said Father Shamoun Butris, a Christian minister in Mosul. "It
is not true, but makes no -difference."
Iraq's Christian community is made up of Eastern
Rite Chaldean Catholics and Assyrian Orthodox Christians, and numbered around
one million, or five per cent of the population, before the US-led invasion.
Traditionally well-educated, they won respect in a Muslim land by specialising
in teaching, academia and medicine, which earned them protected status under
Saddam Hussein. Since his fall, those blessings have turned to curses. Their
well-paid jobs have made them targets for kidnappers, while their grasp of
English has fuelled suspicions that they work as translators for the US Army.
In the past three years, 200,000 have fled abroad.
So far, save for a few brief but bloody car-bombings
against Christian churches, they have at least escaped the mass pogroms of
the kind being meted out to each other by Sunnis and Shias. Now, however,
they sense the start of a systematic campaign. Anxiety has been fuelled by
reports in Mosul of Christian women being told to stop wearing Western clothes.
Muslim leaders deny such claims. Yet the more
hard-line clerics make clear that they no longer see Christians as part of
Mosul's future. "We want an Islamic society, and the Christians should
leave because they follow the occupiers' religion," said Saad al Jibouri,
from the Sunni Al Rahma mosque. "We did not force them to leave, nor
did we kill any of them."
With talk now growing of partitioning Iraq
into federal states for Sunni, Shias and Kurds, some Iraqi Christians want
their own, autonomous zone in an area west of Mosul. But the plan has little
chance of success with the Iraqi government, and with about half of their
number still resident 250 miles away in Baghdad, it has limited support among
Christians themselves.
Despite feeling vulnerable, many Christians
are reluctant to complain. Canon Andrew White, a British clergyman based in
the Green Zone who administers to a 1,000-strong congregation at St George's
Anglican Church in Baghdad, said: "Christians keep stressing to me that
they do not want to over-emphasise what they are going through for fear of
it escalating. But things are bad."
For some in Mosul, there is bewilderment at
why the West - with its powerful Christian figures in George W Bush, Tony
Blair and Pope Benedict XVI - cannot help. Among them is Firaz Adis, 51, who
will pass this Christmas without his son Ricot, kidnapped from Mosul University
four months ago. "I paid a ransom of $10,000 but they killed my son anyway,"
he sobbed. "They said 'This will keep happening as long as you are agents
of the occupiers'. I ask all the Christians in the world: 'Please help us'."
