March 21, 2008

Attacks on the minority community continue after archbishop’s death.

ISTANBUL – Days after the body of a kidnapped archbishop was found buried in northern Iraq, fresh kidnappings and murders continue to haunt the country’s Christians this Passion Week.

“We have people threatened, people kidnapped, people killed – this is Holy Week,” Kirkuk’s Chaldean Archbishop Luis Sako said.

Danger in Mosul may be great enough to effectively cancel Easter in the city this year, one clergyman said.

“We could close our churches in Mosul to protect ourselves and say to everyone that we don’t accept the situation,” Dominican Father Najeeb Mikhail said. “Or we can hold all the celebrations, and maybe we will receive some bombs or attacks.”

Fr. Mikhail affirmed that Mosul’s Christian denominations planned to remain in the city despite the attacks.

His comments came yesterday, only hours before meeting with Mosul’s Syrian Orthodox and Syrian Catholic bishops to decide how to help the city’s now leaderless Chaldean flock. Chaldean Archbishop Paulus Faraj Rahho, kidnapped last month while leaving a Mosul church, was found dead last Thursday (March 13), buried in a shallow grave.

The specifics of Rahho’s death remain uncertain, but Mikhail said that, according to an autopsy, he had died five to seven days prior to his discovery. The archbishop had been in poor health and on several medications, none of which were with him when he was kidnapped on February 29.

Rahho’s funeral was held last Friday (March 14) at the Mar Addai church in the town of Karamlis, 20 miles east of Mosul.

Following a mass celebrated by Chaldean Patriarch Emmanuel III Delly and heavily attended by church leaders as well as by Muslim religious leaders and government officials, Rahho’s body was laid to rest next to that of his former diocesan priest, Ragheed Ghanni.

Last May, Rahho had celebrated Ghanni’s funeral mass at Mar Addai church after gunmen murdered Ghanni and three deacons for refusing to convert to Islam while leaving Mosul’s Holy Spirit Church.

Rahho’s two bodyguards and driver, shot during his abduction, were mourned there only two weeks ago.

“Christians in Mosul have made so many sacrifices for the freedom of the Iraqi people, and this kidnapping, God willing, will be the last disaster,” a representative of Mosul’s mayor said at the funeral mass, according to Iraqi Christian website Ankawa.com.

Lenten Attacks

But since Rahho’s death, attacks on Christians have continued.

The day of the archbishop’s funeral, a young Assyrian was gunned down in the same area of Mosul where the Christian leader was kidnapped, Fr. Mikhail said.

Unidentified men attempted to kidnap Rani Youssef Hanna, 25, as he was leaving the Mar Toma church on March 14, Iraqi Christian website Ankawa.com reported. The men shot the Christian after he escaped their grasp.

Hanna had moved to Syria, where he taught religion classes, two years prior with his family. He was back in Iraq on a two-week visit at the time of his murder.

On Saturday (March 15), Ankawa.com reported that a Christian woman from the predominantly Syrian Orthodox village of Bartalla, 15 miles east of Mosul, had been kidnapped. The website said that captors had asked for money in exchange for releasing the mother of five.

According to Fr. Mikhail, a third kidnapping attempt occurred on a young Christian man in Mosul this week. The young man has been hospitalized after his would-be kidnappers shot him when he escaped.

The attacks are part of larger violence and lawlessness that has affected all of Iraq’s ethnic and religious groups. Approximately 4.5 million Iraqis have been uprooted by the war, BBC reported yesterday.