Three people were killed and at least 20 wounded in attacks on two churches in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk last Sunday. Two churches in Baghdad, as well as the office of the Vatican mission to Iraq in the capital, were also targeted by bomb blasts.

In a series of carefully coordinated strikes, St Joseph’s Roman Catholic church in east Baghdad was the first to come under attack as worshippers gathered for evening Mass. Minutes later, a car exploded outside a small church in north Kirkuk. Shortly afterwards, bombs detonated outside an Anglican church in Baghdad and the Chaldean Church of the Immaculate Mary in Kirkuk. A bomb also exploded 50 yards away from the offices of the Vatican mission to Iraq in Baghdad.

The police chief of Kirkuk said the bombs were believed to have been booby-trapped cars, and not the work of suicide bombers. Chaldean Patriarch Emmanuel Delly III narrowly avoided being caught up in the bomb attacks when a security delay made him late for Mass at one of the targeted churches in Baghdad. In Baghdad on Monday, some 400 Christian clerics demonstrated in protest against the weekend’s violence.

The UN Special Representative, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, too, condemned the attacks and called for better protection for worshippers in Iraq. But the Apostolic Nuncio, Fernando Filoni told The Tablet: “The Church will continue as usual; the mission will continue as usual. Everything will continue as usual.” Although nothing was known about the perpetrators’ identity, he said the style of the attacks “bore a resemblance to those of August 2004”, in a reference to bomb attacks on five churches in Baghdad and Mosul that killed 12 and injured 50 (The Tablet, 7 August, 2004).

Speaking after the funeral in Kirkuk Cathedral of Fadi Raad Elias, a 14-year-old victim of last Sunday’s attacks, Archbishop Louis Sako of Kirkuk praised the “astonishing courage” of Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants alike. He told Aid to the Church in Need, the Catholic charity, of the defiance of his faithful, whom he said “would not be pushed out of Iraq” by acts of aggression.

Archbishop Sako said fundamentalist clerics in Iraq had ordered the attacks as revenge for a series of cartoons in a Danish newspaper, Jyllends-Posten, which last September depicted the Prophet Mohammed as a suicide bomber. The images were subsequently broadcast around the Arab world. Any portrayal of Mohammed is blasphemous in Islam, lest it encourages idolatry. The attacks came just hours after Archbishop Sako made a public statement condemning the cartoons, stressing that they reflected the views of a tiny minority of Christians and contradicted Church teaching on inter-faith dialogue.

As The Tablet went to press, no group had yet claimed responsibility for the bombings, although this is not uncommon in a country when there are regularly as many as 20 explosions a day. Co-ordinated attacks of this nature have become the hallmark of the al-Qaida affiliate group led by the Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Many Christians have fled the country to neighbouring Jordan, Syria and Turkey since the fall of Saddam, citing poor security as the predominant reason.

Less then 3 per cent of the population – 750,000 – remain Christians, mostly in Baghdad and Kirkuk. Sunday’s violence comes during a time of swiftly rising sectarian tensions as reprisal killings and raids between Sunni and Shia militias threaten to undermine efforts to form a broad-based government after last December’s parliamentary elections.

(Published in The Tablet, 4th Feb 2006)