Editor's note: This is part three in a special week-long series regarding the current physical, political and spriritual environment in Iraq.
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Two weeks ago, Raad Karim Essa arrived home from work to find his furniture on the street. His Muslim landlord wasn't renting to Christians anymore.
"He told us not to argue and threatened us," said Essa, 42, a father of four. "He said the government was no longer here to protect us. What could we do? We feared for our lives."
"The Muslims want to destroy us," said Amira Nisan, 38, Essa's wife. "I think we were better off under Saddam."
Such a sentiment is voiced increasingly today among Iraq's 800,000 Christians.
Like most of their countrymen, Christians greeted the fall of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with celebration and hope. But in little more than a month, their desire for greater religious freedom has been replaced by fear of the fundamentalism rippling through Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority, which has moved quickly to exert its influence after decades of violent repression.
Christian women say they've been harassed by Shiite men for walking on the street without head scarves, and priests complain that Shiite clerics inflame religious hatred by calling for the expulsion from Iraq of "nonbelievers."
The most overt acts have been directed at Iraq's liquor stores and manufacturers, almost universally run by Christians. The owners of those facilities say they've been threatened with death for selling alcohol, forbidden under a strict interpretation of Islamic law.
"I'm afraid for my people," said Bishop Ishlemon Warduni, the religious leader of Iraq's Chaldean community, which represents about 80 percent of the nation's Christians. The remaining 20 percent is comprised mostly of Syrians, Assyrians and Armenians.
"During the war, we were not afraid like we are now," said Warduni, 60. "All Christians are in danger."
Last week, Warduni expressed his concerns in a letter to President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Tuesday (May 13), the bishop is scheduled to make his case in a meeting with Jay Garner, the retired U.S. Army general who has been administering Iraq.
"We would like a guarantee of our rights, our freedom and our protection," Warduni said. "We have a 2,000-year history in Iraq, and that is now threatened. The fanatics would see us gone."
The worries are most pronounced in southern Iraq, a Shiite stronghold where clerics have issued the most strident calls for the creation of an Islamic republic. Underscoring the dangers, the Christian owners of two liquor stores were shot to death last week in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, after rebuffing demands to shutter their shops.
But religious tensions are high and rising in Baghdad as well.
"Ten days ago was better than a week ago, and a week ago was better than today," Warduni said. "I have no doubt that tomorrow will be worse. We're losing what little protection we had."
Under Saddam, Christians were permitted to worship but not to publicly express their views or proselytize. It also was forbidden to give children Christian names.
While those strictures have been swept aside, Christians say they feel even less free in the face of growing Shiite pride and power. In the chaotic days after Baghdad's fall, Shiite clerics sent armed followers to patrol neighborhoods and to safeguard schools and hospitals from looting.
Still under Shiite control, some of those hospitals now bear signs ordering any woman seeking treatment to wear a head scarf.
More disconcerting to many Christians is the belief that they're being targeted for violence and rape by Muslim men. Parishioners and priests at a half-dozen churches in recent days told stories of women and young girls snatched from the streets in broad daylight. Almost inevitably, however, those telling the stories can provide no details, saying they heard them from a friend or family member.
According to one account repeated at several parishes, a Christian man, Arkan David Belu, 28, was shot to death by several Shiite men as he left a church service Sunday.
"They killed him only because he was a Christian," said Zuher Butros, 60, the caretaker at St. George Chaldean Church in the New Baghdad neighborhood.
Belu, 28, was indeed shot to death, but his uncle, Hikmat Belu, said the killing had nothing to do with his nephew's religion. Belu, the uncle said, was simply caught in the cross fire between warring gangs, which have terrorized the capital in the absence of any police presence.
The relationship between Muslims and Christians has grown more sensitive with the profusion of new mosques. In almost every Baghdad neighborhood, vacant buildings and former government offices have been converted into Shiite houses of worship.
One such mosque, Jama Al-Wehda Al-Islamiya, or Unity of Islam, sits directly across the street from Warduni's church, Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. Before the war, the building served as the neighborhood headquarters for the ruling Ba'ath Party. Later, it was looted and partially burned.
The Shiite moved in three weeks ago, mounting a half-dozen loudspeakers that blare the call to prayer five times a day, sometimes interfering with church services across the street.
The mosque's imam, Sheik Ali Al-Bahadili, said he is supportive of an Islamic state, but he said it should be one that respects the rights of Christians and other Iraqi minority groups. He flatly rejected claims that Muslims have been targeting or intimidating Christians.
Sam Hanna argues otherwise.
One morning last week, the 43-year-old Christian arrived at his Baghdad liquor store to find a note that had been slipped under the door. "It said that if we didn't stop selling alcohol, the shop would be bombed and we would be killed," Hanna said. "They said alcohol was against God's law. Hah! It's against God's law to sell alcohol but not to kill people? They are hypocrites."
The situation is equally grave for the region's distilleries. About 20 miles north of Baghdad, in the town of Baquba, six factories that once manufactured whiskey, gin and arak, a sweet Arabic liquor, have been closed for a month or more. A Shiite cleric went from factory to factory with a large group of armed men, decreeing that only medicinal alcohol could be manufactured in the future.
"Everyone's afraid," said Albert Paul Younan, 42, the manager at the Al-Abraj alcohol plant. "We agreed that we would make alcohol only for medicine, and still they come."
Younan said he sought help from a United Nations facility in Baghdad, where he spoke with an American military commander.
"I told him we need protection, and he said, `I'm sorry. You're going to have to protect yourselves,'" Younan said. "There is no law anymore. There is only Islamic law. God help us all."
World Vision is now attempting to bring relief and support to the people of Iraq. For more information on World Vision's ongoing efforts to ease the suffering of those formerly under the oppressive regime in Iraq, and to find out how you can help with a one-time donation, click here now.
