According to the site Ankawa.com yesterday afternoon two policemen guarding the Chaldean Church of St Paul in the district of Hay Althaqafa were killed by unknown men.
The church of St. Paul, where Archbishop Paulos Faraj Raho, the Chaldean bishop abducted and killed in 2008, was parish priest for years, has already been attacked in the past but in the case of what happened yesterday there are not details by now indicating if it was a direct attack on the building. Certainly, however, the coincidence with the anniversary of the violence that between September and October of last year hit the Christian community in Mosul is disturbing. Especially considering also the news coming from the Nineveh Plain, the area near Mosul where many Christians live and that for years has been a popular destination for Christians fleeing violence. As declared to Aid to the Church in Need by Father Bashar Warda, rector of the Chaldean Major Seminary of Saint Peter in Ankawa, the area of the Plain is witnessing a slow but steady bleeding of Christian families who are leaving it. Bleeding that could soon become a mass exodus.
To sow terror, according to Father Warda, was the abduction, on September 26, of a well-known doctor, Mahasen Bashir Toma of Bartella, an almost wholly Christian village, that although solved in one day after the payment of a ransom destroyed the feeling of relative security in the area.
And things might even get worse with the general elections in January 2010 when a new wave of violence although not sure is pessimistically expected by a community that, said the priest, when the situation get worse has as its first option the emigration.
Again the age-old problem. On the one hand the Church invites the faithful not to leave Iraq, and on the other those who put their security before their attachment to the country and to the traditions and who, even knowing to expose themselves to an often difficult fate, answer Church’s calls to stay by turning their back to a too bitter past.