Christianity - Tag Search

A bomb outside a historic church in Mosul killed one person earlier today -- the first in what could be a series of coordinated attacks targeting Iraq's Christian community over the next few days.

Iraqi security forces have not identified any specific threats, but they have warned Christian leaders that churches will be targeted during the Christmas holiday. So Iraq's dwindling Christian community has scaled back its celebrations: The Chaldean bishop of Basra, Imad al-Banna, has asked Christians not to publicly celebrate the holiday; bishops in Kirkuk say none of the churches in the city have scheduled a Christmas mass. Large contingents of police have been deployed to churches in Mosul, Baghdad and Kirkuk.

A lot of Israel-and-Palestine news in this morning's roundup, including reports that the Israeli government evicted two Palestinian families from their homes in east Jerusalem and moved in Jewish settlers.

Israeli police are searching for a gunman who opened fire at a gay club in downtown Tel Aviv last night. Two people were killed and 11 wounded in the shooting. Police ordered the closure of a nearby gay bar as a precaution; several members of the Israeli Knesset have described the attack as a "hate crime."

A handful of low-level attacks in Iraq today, most of them targeting policemen. Two officers were killed by gunmen while patrolling in Baghdad; one was killed in Mosul, and three wounded, by a roadside bomb; and a police officer's nephew was kidnapped, tortured and killed in a village near Baquba.

You'll notice from our database that the scale of attacks seems to be dropping. There have been 25 insurgent attacks this month, by our count, but only one of them killed more than ten people (the Tal Afar bombings). We haven't seen the kind of catastrophic bombings we saw last month.

Instead, the insurgents are becoming more focused. A third of the attacks this month have targeted Iraqi police and soldiers; at least three incidents targeted Christians.

I just finished updating our Iraq insurgent attack database, and there's a pattern of anti-Christian violence emerging in the last 36 hours. There were the five church bombings we reported on yesterday, plus another one in Mosul today that injured three children.

And a Christian official in Kirkuk's provincial government was assassinated this morning. It's not clear whether the attack was linked to his religion -- but it certainly is coincidental.

A wave of church bombings in Baghdad over the last 24 hours: 5 bombings killed at least one person and injured more than 20. Attacks on Christians are usually the work of Salafi groups, be they home-grown or foreign.