| LAST WEEK’S suicide bombings at two markets in Baghdad have caused shock and revulsion around the world. Up to 100 civilians were killed in the attacks, and more than 200 wounded. The bombs were apparently carried by mentally disabled women, and were detonated remotely.
The shock in Iraq itself was all the more intense because recent weeks had seen a noticeable decline in the level of violence in Baghdad, as a result of the increased presence of American troops there — the “surge” — since mid-2007.
The Bishop in Cyprus & the Gulf, the Rt Revd Michael Lewis, said that at a recent diocesan synod in Larnaca, Canon Andrew White, of St George’s Anglican Church, Baghdad, had said that the situation in the Iraqi capital had been improving. Therefore, Bishop Lewis said, there was “a huge sense of shock and disappointment at the scale of the horror of what happened”.
Canon White emailed the Episcopal News Service after the bombings. “The[se] atrocities and how they were carried out are just too terrible to take in. We all had such hope that things were changing for the better; we still hope and pray that is the case. Today at church there was pain, fear, but also hope.”
The continuing ability of groups inspired, if not directed, by al-Qaeda, to carry out such atrocities is leaving Iraq’s minority Christian community feeling terrified. As a result, the flow of Christian families across the border into Syria and Jordan continues. Archbishop Avak V. Asadourian, a leader in the Armenian Church in Iraq, said just before the market bombings that Christians were “on the verge of being wiped out”.
Among the Christians remaining in Iraq, Bishop Lewis said, “there is a real sense of having freedom of movement impaired,” and there was a “longing” to return to previous conditions when “people could live together as neighbours.”
In public statements, al-Qaeda has specifically called for the targeting of Christians and Jews across the Middle East and North Africa, and there has been a noticeable increase in such incidents in Algeria in recent weeks. Last week, an al-Qaeda group said it carried out the attack on the Israeli embassy in Mauritania.
Church property, too, continues to be targeted. One of the most recent incidents of this kind was a car-bomb explosion outside a church in the northern Iraq city of Mosul in late January.
Services continue to be held at St George’s, Baghdad, even though the percentage of Anglicans among the 1000 or so worshippers present each week is very small. The church functions under the direction of what Bishop Lewis calls “a keen lay leadership”.
During a recent visit to Bahrain, Bishop Lewis met some of the lay leaders and found them “anxious, but in good heart. But they are aware that the situation needs resolving, because almost all the worshippers are affiliated with ancient mainline denominations in Iraq, and would wish to worship in their own denomination when things become possible.”
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