Iraqi christian congregation massacred in al-Qaida attack

IRAQ’S dwindling Christian community was grieving and afraid yesterday after militants seized a Baghdad church during evening Mass, held the congregation hostage and triggered a raid by Iraqi security forces.

The attack left at least 52 people killed and 67 wounded – nearly everyone inside.

The attack, claimed by an al-Qaida-linked organisation, is the latest assault against Iraq’s Christians, whose numbers have plummeted since the 2003 US-led invasion as the community has fled to other countries.

Outside Our Lady of Deliverance Church, Raed Hadi leaned against the car carrying his cousin’s coffin, waiting for the police to let him bury him on church grounds.

“It was a massacre in there and now they are cleaning it up,” he said yesterday. “We Christians don’t have enough protection . . . What shall I do now? Leave and ask for asylum?”

“Now they make a show,” said Jamal Jaju, who watched as Iraqi forces set up a chain link fence around the church and pushed back observers.

“What can I say? I lost at least 20 friends in there.”

Pope Benedict XVI denounced the assault as “ferocious” and called for renewed international efforts to broker peace in the region. Catholics made up 2.89% of Iraq’s population in 1980; by 2008 they were merely 0.89%.

Islamic militants have systematically attacked Christians in Iraq since the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Sunday’s bloodbath began at dusk, when militants wearing suicide vests and armed with grenades attacked the Iraqi stock exchange. Only two guards were injured in the assault, which may have been an attempt by the militants to divert attention from their real target – the nearby church in an upscale Baghdad neighbourhood.

That attack soon followed. The gunmen went inside the church and took about 120 Christians hostage.

Major General Hussein Ali Kamal, the deputy interior minister, said 52 people were killed and 67 wounded. The dead included at least 10 policemen, two priests and five to eight attackers, according to various accounts.

It was unclear whether most hostages died at the hands of the attackers or during the rescue.

According to two security officials, most of the deaths were in the basement where a gunman killed about 30 hostages when Iraqi forces began to storm the building. One official said the gunman set off an explosives vest he was wearing, but the other said the gunman threw two grenades at his hostages.

A cryptically worded statement posted late on Sunday on a militant website allegedly by the Islamic State of Iraq appeared to claim responsibility for the attack. The group, which is linked to al-Qaida in Iraq, said it would “exterminate Iraqi Christians” if Muslim women in Egypt were not freed.