A spate of bombs targeting churches in Baghdad this week has Iraq’s minority Christian community trembling at the prospect of being the next victim of militants trying to reignite war.

Iraqi Christians, one of the country’s weakest ethnic or  religious groups, have usually tried to steer clear of its many-sided conflict. For the most part, they manage.

While Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims killed each other by the dozen at the height of Iraq’s sectarian conflict in 2006 and 2007, Christians were rarely targeted, although sometimes they were.

(Photo: A policeman at the site of a car bomb attack on a Baghdad church, 13 July 2009/Saad Shalash)

On Sunday, in apparently coordinated attacks, five bombs went off outside churches in Baghdad, killing four people and wounding 21, including a number of Christians.

Iraqi Christians or “Messihi”, as they are called by an Arabic word related to the Hebrew term “Messiah,”  number around 750,000. That makes them a tiny minority in a Muslim nation of 28 million. They are mostly concentrated around Baghdad and the violent northern city of Mosul, which is still struggling to shake off al Qaeda and other Sunni Arab insurgent groups.

Historically, though, they have got on well with their Muslim compatriots. Under Ottoman rule, non-Islamic faiths were generally respected. More recently, Saddam Hussein used to draw attention to his Chaldean Christian Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz, currently doing time for assisting Saddam’s mass murders of Iraqi merchants, as an example of the Baath party’s religious tolerance.

But partly because they are small, Christians are an easy target. About 2,000 families, an estimated 12,000 people, fled Mosul after a campaign of threats and attacks on Christians there in October last year, but many have since returned.

(Photo: A man cleans up after a bomb attack on a Baghdad church, 13 July 2009/Thaier al-Sudani)

“Attacking Christians can have a big impact on public opinion, because they are a minority and the international media will take this news seriously. That’s what the extremists want,” William Warida, a Christian and chairman of a Baghdad human rights organisation told me. “And some extremists just don’t want the existence of Christians in this country at all.”

The country’s Christians fall into roughly two denominations, the majority Chaldeans under the authority of the Vatican and the minority Assyrians. “We are like one family, with two brothers: one is Chaldean, one is Assyrian. I have four grandsons: two are Assyrian and two Chladean,” says Assyrian Christian parliamentarian Yunadim Kanna. According to the Rome-based news agency Asianews.it, both Chaldean and Assyrian churches were attacked.

Many Iraqi Christians from both branches speak Syriac-Aramic, a semitic tongue related to old Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.

Today, many of them live in exile in Jordan or Syria, scared off by the chaos unleashed by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

(Photo: Mourners grieve at funeral of bombing victim, 14 July 2009/Mohammed Ameen)

“After Sunday, the Christians that were thinking of coming back from outside, now maybe they will change their minds,” said Warida. “This was a message to them not to come back.”

The Vatican’s procurator for Chaldean Catholics, Chorbishop Philip Najeem, gave the same analysis in an interview with Vatican Radio.

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld

It started with “assalaamu alaykum” and ended with “may God’s peace be upon you.” Inbetween, President Barack Obama dotted his speech to the Muslim world with Islamic terms and references meant to resonate with his audience. The real substance in the speech were his policy statements and his call for a “new beginning” in U.S. relations with Muslims, as outlined in our trunk news story. But the new tone was also important and it struck a chord with many Muslims who heard the speech, as our Middle East Special Correspondent Alistair Lyon found. Not all, of course — you can find positive and negative reactions here.

(Photo: Iraqi in Baghdad watches Obama’s speech, 4 June 2009/Mohammed Ameen)

Among Obama’s Islamic touches were four references to the Koran (which he always called the Holy Koran), his approving mention of the scientific, mathematical and philosophical achievements of the medieval Islamic world and his citing of multi-faith life in Andalusia. These are standard elements that many Islam experts — Muslims and non-Muslims — mention in speeches at learned conferences, but it’s not often that you hear an American president talking about them.

Two religious references particularly caught my attention because they weren’t the usual conference circuit clichés. One was his comment about being in “the region where (Islam) was first revealed” – a choice of past participle showing respect for the religion.

The other came when he said Jerusalem should be “a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.” The Sura al-Isra is the Koran chapter about Mohammad’s Night Journey to heaven, which tradition says started in Jerusalem on what Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary and Jews the Temple Mount. It was an interesting way to cite Islamic tradition to say Jerusalem should be “a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together.” The interjection “peace be upon them” had both an Islamic tone and an interfaith touch.

(Photo: Palestinians in the Gaza Strip watch Obama’s speech, 4 June 2009/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)

Obama also gave the American Muslim population estimate — 7 million — that prompted him to tell a French interviewer earlier this week that the U.S. could be considered “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” He didn’t repeat that phrase in his speech, however, possibly because the figures don’t back it up. Figures for Muslim populations are dodgy because many countries don’t keep such data. Recent estimates of the U.S. Muslim population range from 1.8 to 7-8 million, so he’s taken about the highest figures around. If those figures are correct, the U.S. would still only rank only about 30th on the list of countries with the largest Muslim populations. That’s way down on this Wikipedia list, with Azerbaijan and Burkina Faso. That’s nowhere near the really big Muslim populations like the top three Indonesia (195 million), Pakistan (160 million) and India (140 million). Maybe that’s why his speechwriters backed off the “one of the largest” claim.

The end of the speech also had an interesting twist. Obama reached for one of the quotes from the Koran that Muslims cite most frequently when they call for tolerance among peoples: “The Holy Koran tells us, “O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.”

(Photo: Egyptians in cafe watch Obama’s speech, 4 June 2009/Asmaa Waguih)

But he followed it up with quotes from the other two Abrahamic religions: “The Talmud tells us: ‘The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.’ The Holy Bible tells us, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God’.”

What did you think of Obama’s speech?

Here’s a short video about the speech:

Thousands of Shi’ite Muslims in southern Iraq are wrestling with a choice of religion or democracy before a pilgrimage which may prevent them from voting in elections to provincial councils on Saturday.

Pilgrims from the southern city of Basra are setting out on an arduous walk hundreds of km (miles) long to the holy Shi’ite city of Kerbala, far from the election centres where they are registered to vote. The pilgrimage for Arbain, or 40 days of mourning for the Prophet Mohammad’s grandson Imam Hussein slain in battle at Kerbala in the 7th century, culminates in mid-February.

(Photo: Pilgrims in Kerbala for Arbain, 27 Feb 2008/Mohammed Ameen)

“Kerbala is more important than voting, and so far I haven’t seen any candidate that deserves my confidence. I still have no job after the last election,” said Mohammed Ali, one of a group of pilgrims at a roadside tent.

Read here the full story from Mohammed Abbas in Basra. Missy Ryan in our Baghdad bureau reported last week that Iraq’s religious parties could face a backlash at the polls because voters have tired of too much religion in politics.

Missy Ryan in our Baghdad bureau sees a possible drop in support for religious parties in Iraq:

BAGHDAD - When Iraqis last voted in 2005, some in Washington feared the mainly Muslim nation would veer in the direction of Iran, an Islamic theocracy, instead of becoming the moderate democracy they envisioned for post-Saddam Iraq.

The question when Iraqis elect new provincial leaders on January 31 will be whether the religious parties that have dominated politics since then can hang on to power despite a bitterness felt by voters starved of services and security.

“Religious parties didn’t keep their promises. They exploited our problems,” said Safaa Kadhim, a teacher in Basra, reflecting anger voiced across Iraq toward the major parties, mostly founded along sectarian lines and seen by many as corrupt and self-serving…

In an opinion poll by the government’s National Media Center in November, 68 percent of those questioned rejected the use of religious appeals in the campaign and 42 percent said they favored secular parties, while 31 percent supported religious parties.

Read the full story here.

(Photo: Election campaign posters in Baghdad’s Sadr City, 13 Jan, 2009/Kahtan al-Mesiary)