IRAQ: Mourners hold funeral procession for Christian victims in Baghdad

Record ID: 784236

  • Title: IRAQ: Mourners hold funeral procession for Christian victims in Baghdad
  • Date: 15th July 2009
  • Summary: MUSLIM AND CHRISTIAN WOMEN ATTENDING MASS
  • Embargoed: 30th July 2009 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Iraq
  • Country: Iraq
  • Topics: Religion
  • Reuters ID: LVA4100SZFGC09MLM362ICJCEX3D
  • Story Text: STORY : Dozens of mourners held a funeral procession in Baghdad on Tuesday (July 14) for two Christian victims who were killed in a car bomb attack that targeted Virgin Mary Church two days ago.
    On Sunday evening (July 13) several bombs exploded outside five Christian churches across Baghdad in an apparently coordinated strike that killed four people and wounded more than 30.
    Relatives and friends attended a memorial services held in Virgin Mary Church on Eastern Baghdad's Palestine Street.
    "You see, you hear, all the people are together, we are brothers, you have seen maybe Muslims and Christians are together. We came to pray that our Lord live the eternal life for the Christian people. That the Lord give happiness for their families and consolations, and especially we pray that our Lord give peace and security for Iraq," Bishop Shlemon Warduni of Baghdad, an assistant to the head of the Catholic Chaldean church in Iraq, said.
    Ayad al-Tameri, who is the head of Assyrian tribe, called for Christians to challenge violence operations which are targeting their areas, asking them to return to the Churches to resume their normal life.
    "I call upon Christians to be patient and stand up because they are the natives. I ask them to go to churches to attend mass. We will not care about the terrorists and criminals who conducted terror acts," he said during the funeral procession.
    Iraq's Christians, believed to number about 750,000, are a small minority in a mainly Muslim country of about 28 million people. Christians have sporadically been targets, mostly in Baghdad and Mosul, leading many of them to flee abroad.
    Some 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.
    The sectarian violence that nearly tore Iraq apart in 2006 and 2007 has faded but militants still carry out attacks.
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