By SOMINI SENGUPTA and IAN FISHER
Published: August 2, 2004
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 1 – In the first significant attacks against Iraq’s Christian minority, assailants staged coordinated car bombings on Sunday evening near four churches in Baghdad and another in Mosul, in northern Iraq.
In Baghdad, at least 11 people, including 2 children, were killed in the explosions, which were timed to coincide with Sunday evening Mass, and at least 20 people were wounded, witnesses and hospital officials said. One person died in the Mosul attack, and seven people were wounded, a United States military report said.
At least one church, in a Christian enclave in the Karada neighborhood of downtown Baghdad, was struck as the priest was giving communion. Next door, a Muslim family of five was killed by the blast, which was powerful enough to rip a row of bricks from the top floor of the building and shatter the windows in a courtyard well down the block. A hospital official said a Muslim passer-by also was killed in one of the blasts.
“It is a crime,” Msgr. Raphael Kutemi said in front of the rectory of the Syrian Catholic church, Our Lady of Deliverance. “It is Sunday, and we were in prayer.”
The bombings seemed to be another turning point in the already terrifying violence that has racked Iraq since the American-led invasion last year.
Even in this long-secular capital city, a rising tide of Islamist extremism since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government has shuttered liquor stores, often owned by Christians, and beauty salons, and compelled women and girls to cover their heads. It was not clear if the attacks on the churches were an extension of fundamentalist fervor or a calculated escalation by insurgents who have shown a willingness to broaden their attacks, even on fellow Muslims, in their fight against the American presence here and the new interim Iraqi government.
Minutes before the Syrian Catholic church was struck, another car bomb exploded in front of the nearby Armenian church during Mass. And inside a seminary compound in Doura, a neighborhood in southern Baghdad, two cars loaded with explosives blew up. A fourth blast was set off across town in an enclave called New Baghdad when a car carrying explosives crashed into the car in front of it and blew up yards from a Catholic church but in front of a mosque. Across Baghdad, the evening sky was laced with plumes of thick black smoke. American military helicopters hovered over the blast sites. The smell of charred metal lingered in the air long after the fires were extinguished and darkness fell.
About the same time Sunday evening, in Mosul, about 220 miles north of Baghdad, parishioners were leaving Mass at a Catholic church when a car bomb detonated. An American military report said the blast was caused by a bomb in a four-door Toyota Supra.
Meanwhile, the fate of seven foreign truck drivers taken hostage last week remained uncertain.
Agence France-Presse reported that a Kenyan government official in Nairobi had said that all seven – three Kenyans, three Indians and an Egyptian – had been freed. But neither the Kuwaiti company that employed them nor the Muslim sheik who had tried to negotiate their release confirmed that. In fact, the sheik, Hisham al-Dulaymi, said Sunday evening that the hostage-takers, who call themselves the Bearers of the Black Banners, had warned him in a letter that they were prepared to behead their captives.
The sheik said he would not take part in any more negotiations, adding that he believed that the kidnappers would begin executing hostages soon.
“They are going to carry out their threat,” he said Sunday afternoon, showing the letter, in a plain brown envelope, which he said had been sent to him by insurgents signaling that negotiations for the hostages’ freedom had failed.
He said the hostages’ employer, Kuwait Gulf and Link Transport, had refused to furnish what the kidnappers described as compensation money for those killed in clashes with American troops in Falluja, the western insurgency hotbed. He would not specify how much the kidnappers had demanded, but it was a suggestion nonetheless of less-than-ideological imperatives driving the taking of hostages.
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