For Iraqi Christians, hope has given way to fears of Muslim fundamentalism, reports Lara Marlowe in Baghdad
The gunmen who've cordoned off the street outside Our Lady of Sorrows church in downtown Baghdad look like a ragtag militia, but they are members of the grandly named "Special Police Force" created by the occupying US army. In these violent days, the Catholics are glad of their presence.
"We have no problem with the Muslims," explains Father Nadheer Dakko (32), the parish priest. Inside the 16th-century walls of Baghdad's oldest church, he has just completed a three-hour Easter Mass. Much of the liturgy was chanted by the priest in Aramaic, the ancient language that Christ spoke.
"Iraqis like Christians because they know we are peaceful. We don't carry guns, and we don't get involved in feuding," Father Nadheer says. "The policemen told me they would protect us. Ten of them spent the night here."
Some fundamentalists consider Christians and Jews to be infidels deserving of death. "But we are more afraid of the battle itself," says Father Nadheer. "If the Shia of Shorja [the downtown market area where his church is located] attack the Americans and the Americans retaliate, our church will be destroyed."
Father Nadheer's flock are the poorest Christians in Iraq, working as pushcart vendors, labourers and shoe-shine boys. They live in the impoverished Shia quarters of al-Douriyeen, Mrabaah and Sinak.
The priest fears the Shia, who over the past week rose up against coalition forces, more than the Sunni. "They haven't enough education," he says. "They are very simple people, with simple ideas. I don't hate them, but I see when I speak with them that they are very limited. The Sunnis have more education, and they believe in authority."
This year, Easter coincided with the Shia festival of Arba'een, which commemorates the return to Iraq of the head of the martyred Imam Hussein. The religious holidays followed a week of fighting, which came perilously close to Our Lady of Sorrows.
"Two days ago, there were American tanks and hummers (Humvees) fighting with gunmen around the corner in al-Jumhurriyeh street," Father Nadheer says. "For us, the biggest danger is getting caught in the crossfire."
At 3 a.m. yesterday, and again at 4.30, Father Nadheer heard 10 loud explosions, possibly from nearby al-Adhamiya or Haifa Street, where US troops are often attacked.
"We are very afraid," the priest says. "Until the war, our church was always packed at Easter."
Yesterday, the sanctuary held perhaps 200 people, the women in lace scarves seated separately from the men. Incense swirled in the sunbeams that entered through high windows. Father Nadheer's tenor voice resonated down the sky-blue vaulted nave. Vases filled with yellow roses and daffodils stood behind the altar, beneath a painting of the Virgin Mary in an ornate mother-of-pearl frame.
Earlier this year, insurgents fired a mortar at the Iraqi Central Bank next to the church. The mortar missed its target, blew a metre-wide hole through the outer wall of the courtyard and sent shrapnel ricochetting off the walls. "It happened half an hour after people went home from Mass," Father Nadheer sighs.
Iraq's Chaldean and Assyrian Catholics trace their origins to Addaï and Mari, followers of Saint Thomas who walked from Palestine to Turkey and Mesopotamia in the first century A.D. "They were the original people here," says Monsignor Fernando Filoni, the Papal Nuncio in Baghdad. "The Muslims arrived later, with the Arab invasion in the 7th century. The north was full of monasteries and churches, mostly in ruins now."
Twenty years ago, there were up to three million Christians in Iraq; today, less than one million remain, two-thirds of them Chaldean Catholics. The Christians left to save their sons from fighting in Saddam's wars, and for economic reasons.
"Anyone who had the means to leave went," says Father Nadheer.
In February, a US tank pulled suddenly onto the highway near Samarra and a car carrying two seminarians and three laymen crashed into it. Only one of the seminarians survived, and he is handicapped for life. "Of course it was the Americans' fault," said Father Joseph Atticha, a Dominican friar. "They didn't apologise. They didn't offer compensation."
In recent months, the parishioners of Our Lady of Sorrows have noticed an influx of foreigners whom they believe to be Iranian Shia, in nearby Bataween, a neighbourhood of drug addicts and squatters. "The men dress all in black and wear baggy trousers," says Father Nadheer. "They look hostile, very hard, and they speak Arabic with an Iranian accent. We see them in the streets."
"We had got used to the idea of the Americans," Father Nadheer continues. "We were trying to get on with our lives. Now nobody knows who is responsible for the latest atrocity: America, Iran, Zarqawi, al-Qaeda..." (Mussab al-Zarqawi is a Jordanian Sunni Muslim fundamentalist whom the Americans accuse of trying to ignite a war between Sunni and Shia.)
Some of the parish's problems relate to them specifically as Christians. "Families keep coming to me and complaining that teachers and headmasters are ordering girls to wear hijab ," Father Nadheer said. "We had such pressures when Saddam was in power, but there were laws then and we were protected."
The priest tells worried parents to try to reason with Muslim headmasters, to say that religion must be kept separate from education. If that doesn't work, Father Nadheer goes to see the teacher. "Last month, I went to see a Shia headmaster in West Baghdad. He said there was no difference between Muslim and Christian girls, that it was a question of morality, that a girl who doesn't cover her head is trying to excite boys."
The selling of alcohol is another source of problems for the Christian community. Under Saddam, Christians were given special licenses to sell wine and beer, a practice they continued after the US invasion. "A lot of the Muslims who attack Christians for selling alcohol aren't fundamentalists at all; just thieves," says Father Nadheer. "We see Muslims selling alcohol in the street, and nobody bombs them. We get bombed because they know that Christians have no Mahdi's Army [the militia loyal to the Shia Sheikh Moqtada al-Sadr]." Since February there has been a spate of attacks against Christians selling alcohol. "Just in our neighbourhood, there were four shops attacked. In Baya'a, six shops; in Rabiah Street, three," Father Nadheer says. "In Habibya, two shops were destroyed and an owner was killed." One of his parishioners, named Issam, was shot for selling alcohol and has survived eye and brain surgery.
Though most of Father Nadheer's parishioners are too poor to be targeted for kidnapping, more affluent Christians are often abducted for ransom. The 11-year-old son of a neighbour was recently nabbed while riding his bicycle. The kidnappers' starting price: $40,000. In a rare police raid, the child was freed with three others. The family then fled to northern Iraq.
The villages of the north are packed with Christians from Baghdad. But no place in Iraq is truly safe. A village called Karakosh has received bomb threats. "There were no demands made," Father Nadheer said. "They just want to scare people, create chaos."
Father Joseph Atticha's age and European education seemed to have given him a broader viewpoint. The 75-year-old priest cannot sleep at night, worrying about the US siege of Falluja. He spent much of Easter weekend praying for that town's Sunni Muslims.
At Easter one year ago, Father Joseph says, "All Iraqis were hopeful. But misfortune followed misfortune, and now it's total disillusionment. The Americans promised to rebuild Iraq, but they are still destroying it."
In his Easter homily, Father Joseph told the story of Saint Peter renouncing Christ, only to be entrusted with the founding of the Church. "The connection with Iraq," he explains, "is that everything that is broken can be repaired."
Behind the bombed out Ministry of Information, Hanna Toma, the guard at the Anglican Church of St George of Mesopotamia proudly showed me the sanctuary he'd prepared for the arrival of Canon Andrew White from Coventry, for an Easter service late yesterday.
Mr Toma lined up the plastic chairs that were donated to replace the pews carried away by looters a year ago.
The looters smashed holes in a large plaster plaque "To the Memory of One Million Dead of the British Empire Who Fell in the Great War 1914-1918," apparently believing there was treasure hidden behind it.
But the high stained-glass window with a harp and crown evaded the looters and vandals. "Erected by the 8th King's Irish Hussars The Royal Iniskilling Fusiliers The Royal Ulster Rifles The Royal Irish Fusiliers and the Connaught Rangers in memory of their comrades laid to rest in this country," says the gothic script beneath the harp. A few miles away, in Baghdad's north cemetery, Irish names on dozens of tombstones are a reminder of an earlier insurgency, the revolt by Sunni and Shia Muslims which followed Lieut Gen Sir Stanley Maude's invasion of Iraq in 1917.