BAGHDAD, Iraq – A coordinated series of explosions outside five churches in Baghdad and Mosul during Sunday evening services killed 11 people and wounded more than 50, shattering stained-glass windows and sending churchgoers running into the streets, screaming and clutching their bleeding heads.
Separate violence beginning the night before killed 24, including an American soldier, and wounded 101. The toll included a suicide car bombing outside a Mosul police station that killed five people and wounded 53, and clashes in Fallujah between U.S. troops and insurgents that killed 12 Iraqis and wounded 39 others.
The unprecedented attacks against Iraq’s 750,000-member Christian minority seemed to confirm community members’ fears they might be targeted as suspected collaborators with American forces amid a rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism.
“What are the Muslims doing? Does this mean that they want us out?” Brother Louis, a deacon at Our Lady of Salvation, asked as he cried outside the damaged Assyrian Catholic church. “Those people who commit these awful criminal acts have nothing to do with God. They will go to hell.”
The wave of explosions – at least four of them car bombings – began after 6 p.m. as parishioners gathered inside their neighborhood churches for services.
The explosions came just minutes apart and hit four churches in Baghdad – two in Karada, one in the Dora neighborhood and one in New Baghdad. A fifth church was hit in Mosul. The attacks did not appear to be suicide bombings, U.S. military and Iraqi officials said.
Iraqi police discovered a sixth bomb, consisting of 15 mortar rounds, outside a Baghdad church, and authorities disarmed it, the U.S. military said in a statement.
“This (attack) isn’t against Muslims or Christians, this is against Iraq,” Deputy Foreign Minister Labid Abawi said.
Muslim clerics condemned the violence and offered condolences to the Christian community.
“This is a cowardly act and targets all Iraqis,” Abdul Hadi al-Daraji, spokesman for radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, told Al-Jazeera television.
Also Sunday, a Lebanese businessman taken hostage was released, a day after he was snatched by gunmen outside Baghdad, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry said. It was not immediately clear if a ransom was paid for Vladimir Damaa’s release.
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