A string of anti-Christian bombings has cost six more lives in the wake of a Baghdad church bloodbath, sowing panic in Iraq’s 2,000-year-old minority on Thursday.
“Since Tuesday evening, there have been 13 bombs and two mortar attacks on homes and shops of Christians in which a total of six people were killed and 33 injured,” a defence ministry official said.
“A church was also damaged,” he added.
The attacks come less than two weeks after 44 Christian worshippers, two priests and seven security personnel died in the seizure of the Baghdad church by Islamist gunmen and the ensuing shootout when it was stormed by troops.
On November 3, Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the hostage taking at the capital’s Syrian Catholic cathedral and warned it would step up attacks on Christians.
As Christians converged on their churches today to seek counsel from their religious leaders, the capital’s Syrian Catholic archbishop made an emotional appeal for Western countries to come to their rescue.
“It would be criminal on the part of the international community not to take care of the security of the Christians,” Athanase Matti Shaba Matoka said inside the church targeted on October 31 where he tried to console his flock.
“Everybody is scared,” he said. “People are asking who is going to protect them, how are they going to stay on in Iraq. We are trying to encourage them to stay patient.”
The UN Security Council said on Thursday that it was “appalled" by the militant attacks on Christians and Muslims in Iraq.
There is “a deliberate will to destroy the Christian community” which is “on the front-line of the fight for democracy,” said France’s UN ambassador Gerard Araud.
The UN Security Council was “appalled by and condemned in the strongest terms the recent spate of terrorist attacks in Iraq, including Thursday’s,” said British ambassador Mark Lyall Grant reading a council statement.
Vatican secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone described the latest attacks as “very painful.”
“It is a terrible suffering for all the Christian communities in the world,” Italian news agencies quoted him as saying.
The protection of Iraqi Christians is an issue that “we hope...Will be taken into serious consideration” by the Baghdad government, Bertone added.
The scarred Syrian Catholic cathedral in the central district of Karrada has become a focus of the fears of Christian families.