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Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka ęape-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basin Ózeti

International Herald Tribune

Monday, August 2,2004

Series of bombings targets Christians in Iraai churches

By Somini Sengupta and łan Fisher

BAGHDAD: Targeting Iraq’s Christian minority for the First time, suicide bombers carried out an audacious and carefully coordinated series of attacks near four churches in Baghdad and an-other in the northem city of Mosul late Sunday afteroooiL

In Baghdad, at least 11 people were killed, including 2 children, and 20 were wounded, according to reports from local hospitals. The death toll from Mosul was unclear late Sunday evening.

At least one church, in a lively Christian enclave in the Capital, was struck as the priest was giving communion.

“It is a crime,” the Reverend Raphael Kutemi said in front of the rectory of the Notre Damę of Deliverance, a Syri-an Catholic church. “It is Sunday, and we’re in prayer."

Nearby, another car bomb exploded in front of an Armenian Catholic church. Two cars loaded with explo-sives blew up inside a seminary com-pound in a south Baghdad neighbor-hood called Doura. A bomb in a fourth car, apparently on the way to a Catholic church across town in an enclave called New Baghdad, was involved in an accident and blew up in front of a mosąue.

Across the Capital, the evening sky was laced with plumes of thick black smoke. U.S. military helicopters hovered over the crime scenes. The smell of charred metal lingered in the air after darkness felL

About the same time, in Mosul, about 350 kilometers, or 220 miles, north of Baghdad, parishioners were leaving a Mass when a car bomb was detonated, The Associated Press re-ported.

At no point sińce the U.S. military invasion began last year have Christians, who represent less than 5 percent of Iraq’s 24 million citizens, come un-der fire in such a direct and brazen way.

Since the June 28 transfer of respon-sibility from the American-led occupa-tion authority to a U.S.-supported interim government, guerrillas have directed their wrath on government representatives, law enforcement ofFi-cials, foreign workers, translators and anyone else accused of collaborating with the American troops here, now

numbering about 140,000.

At the same time, the U.S. invasion has unleashed Islamist hard-liners, long suppressed by Saddam Hussein’s government.

Increasingly, liquor Stores and beauty salons, some of them owned by Christians, have been vandalized and forced to shut down. In Baghdad, a mi-litia loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the radic-al Shiite cleric, has been blamed for many of those attacks. At the same time, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordania n operative, has been accused by U.S. officials of assembling a core of Sunni Islamist extremists, some of them from outside Iraq, to foment sec-tarian violence.

The coordinated strikes on Sunday signaled the apex of the Islamist funda-mentalist uprising. It also frightened ordinary Christians and Muslims alike.

“Never, I’m never going to church again on Sunday,” said Khawla Yawo Odishah, 50.

As darkness fell, she lingered across the Street from the compound of St. Peter Seminary in Doura, where two car bombs ezploded, torching several other cars.

Many of her friends would have been

worshiping inside the church Sunday evening, she said. Odishah, a Christian, would have been worshiping at a church next door, but a family medical emer-gency had kept her away.

Meanwhile, the fate of seven foreign truck drivers taken hostage last week remained uncertain.

Agence France-Presse quoted the Kenyan foreign minister as saying that all seven, including three Kenyans, had been freed.

But neither the Kuwaiti company that employed them nor the Muslim sheik who tried to negotiate for their release could confirm it.

In fact, the sheik, Hisham al-Du-laymi, said in an interview that the hos-tage-takers had wamed him in a letter that they were prepared to behead their captives.

Dulaymi said he would recuse him-self from further negotiations.

He also said the hostages’ employer, Kuwait Gulf & Link Transport, had re-fused to furnish what the kidnappers described as compensation money for those killed in clashes with American troops in the western insurgency hot-bed ofFalluja.

He refused to specify how much the kidnappers demanded, but it was a win-dow nonetheless into the less-than-ideological imperatisves driving the hostage-taking.

One of two Lebanese hostages were rescued Sunday by Iraqi soldiers on a raid, but the second remained in captiv-ity.

The New York Times

James Glanz contributed reporting to this article.

Elizabeth DaUiel/The Associated Press

A huge plume of smoke over central Baghdad on Sunday. Blasts in the Capital And Mosul were directed at the country’s Christian minority, and five churches were hit

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