800,000 Christians protected under Saddam,now killed under Bush

Agence France-Presse

A Catholic priest and three of his assistants were shot dead overnight outside a church in northern Iraq, the local police commander said. Brigadier-General Mohammed al-Wagaa, police chief in the divided northern city of Mosul, said the cleric and his colleagues had been shot dead outside the Holy Spirit church in the Nur district (...) In a joint statement, Patriarch Mar Dinka IV of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldaean Catholic Patriarch Emmanuel Delly of Babylon said Baghdad's remaining Christians were facing persecution. Before the US-led invasion of March 2003, there were estimated to be about 800,000 Christians in Iraq, about three per cent of the otherwise largely Muslim population, living mainly in urban centres such as Baghdad...

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