August 02, 2004

Blasts Rock Iraqi Churches

Assailants triggered a coordinated series of explosions outside five churches in Baghdad and Mosul during Sunday evening services, killing 11 people and wounding more than 50 in the first major assault on Iraq's Christian minority since the 15-month-old insurgency began.

Separate violence beginning the night before killed 24, including an American soldier, and wounded 101. The toll included a suicide car bombing outside a Mosul police station that killed five people and wounded 53, and clashes in Fallujah between U.S. troops and insurgents that killed 12 Iraqis and wounded 39 others.

The unprecedented attacks against Iraq's 750,000-member Christian minority seemed to confirm community members' fears they might be targeted as suspected collaborators with American forces amid a rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism.

"What are the Muslims doing? Does this mean that they want us out?" Brother Louis, a deacon at Our Lady of Salvation, asked as he cried outside the damaged Assyrian Catholic church. "Those people who commit these awful criminal acts have nothing to do with God. They will go to hell."
[Well, Duh, Brother Louis.--J.T.]
[...]
"This (attack) isn't against Muslims or Christians, this is against Iraq," Deputy Foreign Minister Labid Abawi told The Associated Press.
[...]
Muslim clerics condemned the violence and offered condolences to the Christian community.

"This is a cowardly act and targets all Iraqis," Abdul Hadi al-Daraji, spokesman for radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, told Al-Jazeera television.

Mohammed Fadil al-Samara'i, an official with the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, blamed terrorist groups and others "who profit from creating civil disturbances in Iraq."

The attacks on the churches signaled a vast change in tactics for insurgents, who have focused many previous attacks on U.S. forces, Iraqi officials and police in a drive to push coalition forces from the country, weaken the interim government and hamper reconstruction efforts.

To escape the chaos here, many of Iraq's Christians have gone to neighboring Jordan and Syria to wait for the security situation to improve.

Many who remained watched with fear as Islamic fundamentalism, long repressed under Saddam Hussein's fallen regime, thrived...

The AP is making stuff again....Saddam didn't repress Sunni Baathist fundamentalism at all, but he did repress Shiites, Christians, Jews and Kurds.
I'm assuming that the Iraqi police and security forces are getting better and making it harder for Zaqarwi and his boys to hit police stations and government officials, so they went after ordinary Christian citizens in unprotected churches.
God rest the souls of those killed and may He heal those who were wounded.
The only thing for it is for us to totally defeat the forces of the Enemy and that will mean that the Iraqis themselves help us a lot more with cooperation and information.
God helps those who help themselves and our soldiers will help the Iraqis to defend a free, secular Iraq!