Iraq's Christians mourn after church massacre

Iraq’s dwindling Christian community was in mourning today after terrorists seized a Baghdad church during evening Mass leading to a gun battle which left at least 52 people dead.

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

Pope Benedict denounced the assault at Our Lady of Deliverance church 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 that proportion had dropped to 0.89%.

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

Yesterday’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 upmarket Baghdad neighbourhood.

Gunmen went inside the Syrian Catholic church and took about 120 Christians hostage.

Maj. Gen. 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.

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

Security officials said most of the deaths were in the basement where a gunman killed about 30 hostages when Iraqi forces began to storm the building.

Video footage from an American drone that was overhead during the attack showed a black plume of smoke pouring out of the church followed by flashes before security forces charged inside. US forces often supply air support to Iraqi forces conducting operations on the ground, feeding them video footage from their airborne drones.

“We have no clear picture yet whether the worshippers were killed by the security forces’ bullets or by terrorists, but what we know is that most of them were killed when the security forces started to storm the church,” said Christian politician Younadem Kana, who condemned the operation as “hasty” and “not professional.”

A cryptically worded statement posted late 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.

It specifically mentioned two women that extremists maintain have converted to Islam and are being held against their will in Egypt.

The two are wives of priests. Some believe they converted to Islam to leave their husbands since divorce is banned by Egypt’s Coptic Church. One woman disappeared in 2004 and the other last July.

Egypt’s Christians had originally maintained they were kidnapped and staged rallies for their release. In both cases, police subsequently recovered the two women, who denied they had converted. They were then spirited away to distant monasteries.

The cases were widely publicised in Egypt, which has its own fraught sectarian relations, have continued to be a rallying point for Egypt’s hardline Muslims. They hold weekly demonstrations in mosques calling for the women’s “release”.

Today Iraqi authorities took extra measures to protect Christian districts and churches in Mosul, Kirkuk and Baghdad.