A Chaldean priest kidnapped in front of his Baghdad home was released on December 10. Father Samy Abdulahad Al-Raiys was freed six days after he had been abducted in Baghdad’s Al-Sinaa street while driving to his parish. He was the fifth priest kidnapped in 2006. Commented one Baghdad priest who requested anonymity, “So many of us are frightened. We are asking, ‘Who will be the next?’” Al-Raiys’ disappearance came only five days after Baghdad Chaldean cleric Douglas Yousef Al-Bazy was released on November 29, his nose broken and requiring surgery. Iraq’s young Christian women have also become open targets for insurgents plying the kidnapping industry. One girl subjected to gang rape took her own life while still hostage, and another was reportedly so traumatized by the torture and sexual violence she suffered that she committed suicide even after the ransom had been paid and she had gone home.

4 – Islamic Rage Triggered

Cartoons in a Danish newspaper portraying Muhammad as violent, and then a papal quote of a Byzantine emperor’s reference to Islam’s violent history, touched off Islamic violence in various countries. Christians were sometimes targeted. In Nigeria, Catholic priest Matthew Gajere of St. Rita’s Catholic Church in Maiduguri, Borno state, and 50 other Christians were killed on February 18 when Muslims extremists enraged by the caricatures burned 31 churches in Maiduguri and Katsina state. Rioters also torched the residence of the bishop of Maiduguri diocese. On February 23, Muslims angry over the cartoons killed 10 Christians and set ablaze nine churches in Kontagora, Niger state.

In Turkey, Father Andrea Santoro, 60, was shot twice in the back with a pistol after Sunday mass on February 5 as he knelt at the altar of the Santa Maria Catholic parish in Trabzon. Oguzhan Aydin, then 16, reportedly said he had murdered the priest as revenge for the Danish cartoons. The killing, for which Aydin received a prison sentence of nearly 19 years, was said to contribute to a deterioration of the religious climate in Turkey. Days later, a Franciscan friar was attacked and threatened by several Turkish youths in Izmir. In the second week of March, a young Turk in the southern port city of Mersin chased two clerics and a group of Catholic youth inside their church, cursing Christianity and threatening them with a butcher knife until he finally surrendered to local police. In July, an elderly French Catholic priest in Samsun, on the Black Sea, survived a knifing by a Turkish Muslim known for spreading false rumors against both Catholics and Protestants in the city.

In Pakistan, cartoon outrage indirectly affected Christians. With emotions running high over the cartoons in massive demonstrations in three major cities, on February 19 a crowd of 500 Muslims burned down two churches and a convent school in the southern province of Sindh over an alleged desecration of the Quran. Wielding gasoline bombs and other flammable chemicals, the mob attacked St. Mary’s Catholic Church and St. Savior’s Church of Pakistan in Sukkur, leaving them gutted. Protests against the caricatures had taken place almost daily in Sukkur.