IRAQ: An endangered Christian community

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For the second time since February, an Iraqi Christian leader has fallen victim to religiously motivated violence. Yousif Adil, a priest in Baghdad, was shot to death Saturday in the capital’s Karrada district, which has become an enclave of sorts for the city’s few remaining Christians.

Last month, the Chaldean Catholic archbishop of the northern city of Mosul, Paulos Faraj Rahho, was found dead after gunmen grabbed him Feb. 29 outside his church after he had finished celebrating a prayer service. Rahho was the highest-ranking Christian leader to be targeted by armed groups in Iraq since the U.S. invasion of March 2003.

As the Los Angeles Times reported in this story Friday, Iraq’s Christian community has been decimated and is estimated to number fewer than a half-million now, compared with more than twice that before the war. As the story pointed out, unlike Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, Christians have no militia to protect them. Churches have closed, and many Christians have fled the country.

Many persevere, though. Last Christmas, as Baghdad enjoyed a relative lull in violence, thousands of Christians crammed churches to celebrate Mass. Last November, Iraq got its first Roman Catholic cardinal when Cardinal Emmanuel III Delly was elevated to the position.

This may have come too late to prevent Christians such as the ones we reported on last summer in this story from fleeing. It certainly did not help Adil, who was to be buried Sunday.

The Associated Press quoted an assistant to Adil as saying he was 40 years old and had moved to Karrada after being forced out of southern Baghdad’s Dora neighborhood, the district profiled in the above-noted story. Adil ran a religiously mixed school for Christian and Muslim children and was married but had no children, according to AP.

At least 12 other people were reported killed in violence in Baghdad and elsewhere Saturday, on what passed for an unusually calm day in the country. The victims included three people inside a bus in central Baghdad that hit a roadside bomb; a police brigadier general shot to death in eastern Baghdad, and four government workers employed to protect oil pipelines who were abducted and murdered near the Iraq-Iran border east of Baghdad.

— Times staff writers