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Bombers target christain churches { August 2 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/08/02/MNGP9818NJ1.DTLhttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/08/02/MNGP9818NJ1.DTL
Bombers target Christian churches
At least 12 killed in 1st major attacks on religious minority
- Somini Sengupta, Ian Fisher, New York Times
Monday, August 2, 2004
Baghdad -- In the first significant attacks against Iraq's Christian minority since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's government, assailants staged a series of coordinated car bombings Sunday evening near four churches in Baghdad and another in the northern city of Mosul.
In Baghdad, at least 11 people, including two children, were killed in the explosions timed to coincide with Sunday evening Mass, and dozens were injured, witnesses and hospital officials said. One person died in the Mosul attack, and seven people were injured, according to a U.S. military report.
At least one church, in a lively Christian enclave in the Karrada neighborhood of downtown Baghdad, was struck as the priest was giving Communion. Next door, a Muslim family of five was killed by the blast, which was powerful enough to rip a row of bricks from the building's top floor and shatter the windows inside a courtyard well down the block. A hospital official said a Muslim passer-by also was killed in one of the blasts.
"It is a crime," Monsignor Raphael Kutemi said in front of the rectory of the Syrian Catholic Church, Notre Dame of Deliverance. "It is Sunday, and we were in prayer."
The bombings Sunday seemed to mark another turning point in the already terrifying violence that has racked Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion last year.
Even in this long-secular capital city, a growing tide of Islamist extremism since the fall of Hussein's government has shuttered liquor stores, often owned by Christians, and beauty salons, and compelled women and girls to cover their heads. It was not clear if the attacks on the churches were an extension of fundamentalist fervor or a calculated escalation by insurgents who have shown a willingness to broaden their attacks, even on fellow Muslims, in their fight against the U.S. presence here and the new interim Iraqi government.
Earlier Sunday, a suicide car bomber raced to a police station in Mosul and blew up his vehicle, killing at least five and wounding 53, U.S. military officials said. In Baghdad early in the morning, another car bomb killed three and injured three others.
A few minutes before the Syrian Catholic Church was struck Sunday evening, another car bomb exploded in front of the nearby Armenian church, as Mass was under way. And inside a seminary compound in the south Baghdad neighborhood of Doura, two cars loaded with explosives blew up. A fourth explosion was set off across town in an enclave called New Baghdad, when a car carrying explosives crashed into the car in front of it and blew up yards from a Catholic church but in front of a mosque.
Across Baghdad, the evening sky was laced with plumes of thick black smoke. U.S. military helicopters hovered over the blast sites. The smell of charred metal lingered in the air long after the fires were extinguished and darkness fell.
About the same time Sunday evening, in Mosul, about 220 miles north of Baghdad, parishioners were coming out of a Catholic church Mass when a car bomb detonated.
The church bombings struck a singular note in the history of the 15-month insurgency. It is the first time since the March 2003 invasion that Christians, who represent less than 5 percent of the country's 24 million citizens, have come under fire in such a direct way. Guerrillas have largely directed their wrath toward Iraqi government representatives and law enforcement officials, as well as foreign workers, translators and anyone else accused of collaborating with the 140,000-strong U.S. troop presence here.
But the U.S.-led invasion unleashed Islamist hard liners, long suppressed during Hussein's rule. In Baghdad, a militia loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has been blamed for many of the attacks against the largely Christian-owned liquor stores. At the same time, the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been accused by U.S. officials of assembling a core of Sunni Muslim extremists, some from outside Iraq, to foment sectarian violence.
Sunday's coordinated strikes sent shock waves among ordinary Christians and Muslims alike.
"Never, I'm never going to church again on Sunday," said Khawla Yawo Odishah, who had escaped the bombing because a family medical emergency had caused her to miss Mass.
As darkness fell, Odishah, 50, lingered across the street from the compound of St. Peter Seminary in Doura, where two car bombs blew up, torching several other cars and filling the night air with the heat and stench of burning metal. This was the Mass many of her friends usually attended, she said.
Faris Talis, a Muslim, said he was in his tire repair store when the first car bomb exploded on the street, spattering bits of glass and metal. Then the second blast went off inside the seminary compound. He ran inside to help what he said were scores of injured and dead.
"I am a Muslim, and I was evacuating them," he said. "I feel terrible about this. Whatever did this is a criminal. He doesn't have any mercy in his heart."
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