IRAQ : ANOTHER PRIEST FEARED KIDNAPPED

December 10, 06
Journal Chretien France

Chaldean church leaders today said they fear that an Iraqi priest in Baghdad who has been missing for two days may have been kidnapped.

Chaldean priest Douglas Yousef Al-Bazy was last seen leaving his parish church by car after celebrating Sunday morning mass on Sunday (November 19).

“We haven’t heard from him since after the mass,” Chaldean Archbishop of Kirkuk Louis Sako told Compass by telephone from Kirkuk. “We don’t know if it was an accident or if it was a kidnapping.”

Al-Bazy, 34, is the parish priest at St. Elijah Church in Baghdad’s Naariya district, Sako said.

Baghdad Auxiliary Bishop Andreas Abouna confirmed today that the Chaldean Patriarchate had received no news on the missing priest.

“He was in the north [of Iraq] for one week and came back last Saturday,” Abouna told Compass by telephone from Baghdad. “He phoned me Saturday evening to say he was back in Baghdad, and that was the last call he made.”

Both Abouna and Sako appealed to Christians around the world to pray for Al-Bazy’s safe return.

In a possible reference to the same incident, The New York Times reported that “an elderly priest” was kidnapped yesterday in Baghdad’s Naariya district. Archbishop Sako told Compass that he had received no news of a second disappearance.

At least four Christian clergymen have been kidnapped in Iraq since July. Al-Bazy may be the fifth.

Iraqi Christians have told Compass that kidnappings and forced donations to violent Islamic militias are a weekly occurrence for the country’s Christian community.

“My cousin had to pay $10,000, my brother-in-law paid $20,000 and I paid $9,000,” one Chaldean source who requested anonymity recently told Compass in northern Iraq. “Last week the Islamic groups bombed three Christian houses because the owners refused to pay.”

This past week, an Assyrian Church of the East priest from Mosul’s St. Mary Church was forced to flee to the Kurdish region because he was unable to continue paying the forced donations, Assyrian International News Agency reported.

According to the agency, the church’s administrative director, Edward Enwiya, his brothers, and an Ancient Assyrian Church of the East priest from the neighboring village of Telkaif had been forced north for the same reason.

Many of Iraq’s Chaldeans believe that attacks on Christians are not carried out randomly, according to Chaldean Auxiliary Bishop of Baghdad Shleman Warduni.

Extremists “target those people who are most involved in the Christian community, the younger and more courageous ones,” the bishop told Catholic news service Asia News. It’s “as if to give a warning to those who persist in hoping that they will be able to continue living in the country.”

In October an Islamic militant ring beheaded a Syrian Orthodox priest from Mosul, 59-year-old Boulos Iskander, after demanding that the city’s churches post signs denouncing a speech made by Pope Benedict XVI in which he implied that Islam was inherently violent. (See Compass Direct News, “Iraqi Kidnappers Behead Priest in Mosul,” October 12.)

In September, Father Basil Yaldo, rector of St. Peter’s Seminary in Baghdad, was kidnapped and released only days later. In two other separate incidents, two young Chaldean priests were kidnapped and eventually released in July and September.

Due to Iraq’s ongoing sectarian violence and attacks specifically targeting the Christian community, some groups estimate that the number of Christians in the country has dropped to 450,000 or fewer, down from 850,000 in 1991.

Chaldean Catholics, an Eastern rite church in communion with Rome, are the largest Christian community in Iraq.