Ben Gilbert, Chronicle Foreign Service

December 24, 2005 

Baghdad -- Christmas songs in Arabic echo into the courtyard from a tiny annex, next to the incomplete main building of St. George Greek Catholic Church. Inside, Father Vincent conducts choir practice for the Christmas Day celebration.

Teenage girls in winter jackets stand in a semicircle around Vincent, singing Christmas songs, while a dozen younger boys and girls look on from green cushioned pews arranged on the concrete floor. On the wall behind the priest, a crucifix shows signs of the sectarian violence besetting this country: Christ's leg is broken off, and his outstretched arm is missing an elbow.

In the early morning of Oct. 16, 2004 -- the eve of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month -- five explosions occurred moments apart, tearing through five churches around Baghdad. The attacks sent a distinct message to Iraq's Christians: Get out.

At St. George, stained glass windows shattered, and icons and pews became fuel for the fire set off by the bomb. By the time it was put out, whole walls were missing, and the interior was scorched.

"The inside was black, like an oven," said Vincent, a Belgian priest who has overseen the church for 25 years and would give only his first name, for safety reasons. "Even the floor was completely ruined. The altar was broken ... nothing remained. All the icons were gone."

But the congregation has succeeded in rebuilding much of the wreckage. The exterior of the church is complete. Interior walls have been painted bright white, and electricians have installed lights for this year's Christmas celebration.

"We started working the night of the bomb," Vincent said. "We had a baptism the same day, and we called the boy George. We said, 'This is a living icon now.' "

About 800,000 to 900,000 Iraqi Christians -- about 3 percent of Iraq's 26 million citizens -- will celebrate Christmas on Sunday. Their numbers are hard to state with certainty, because many have fled to neighboring Syria and Jordan to escape the kidnappings, car bombs and other violence plaguing Iraq.

Yonadem Kanna, secretary-general of the Assyrian Democratic Party, estimates that since 2003, about 50,000 Christians have moved out of Iraq or have moved around within the country to escape lawlessness and growing Islamic fundamentalism.

"At least 100 families have fled from Basra to Baghdad, because there are a lot of militias that are practicing religious fanaticism in the south," he said.

Christians also have left the violent northern city of Mosul to avoid kidnapping, bans on alcohol and, for women, harassment for not wearing the traditional Muslim head covering.

Konna is determined to stay. As head of the political party representing a large ethnic chunk of Iraq's various Christian sects, including the Chaldean Catholic Church and the Assyrian Eastern Orthodox Church, he said things would get better.

"This is a transitional period," he said. "The positive side is that for the first time in history, the government recognizes us as indigenous people of the country, with (the same) full rights as others."

Among the singers at St. George is Anita Daoud Bedawid, a 22-year-old university student studying philosophy and theology. She doesn't like being in Iraq, and like many members of the 100 or so families in the congregation, she wants to leave.

"A lot of things have changed in Iraq," she said. "Every family has a dead person, or a person kidnapped."

Before the war, most churches celebrated an evening Mass on Christmas Eve. This year, churches are celebrating Mass at 2 or 4 in the afternoon, because it's too dangerous to be out at night.

Bedawid said she wouldn't let fear keep her in the house.

"We will buy clothes, we will make a cake, and we will go to my grandmother's to wish Merry Christmas to them," she said.

Her brother Wasim guarded the church gate with an AK-47. The family stood in a new dirt courtyard strewn with bags of concrete and surrounded by an 8-foot wall. Outside, tree trunks are laid in the road to thwart car bombers.

Their mother, 40-year-old Eklas Hannah Thom, said she couldn't stay away on Christmas. "I have to come, because this is God's sacred place," she said.

Across the courtyard, as the sun dipped below the horizon, civil engineer Khaled Shabbah finished work for the day. So far, the church has spent $250,000 in reconstruction. The three-story-high dome is smooth and rounded. Windows have been installed, but the altar and floor are still bare concrete.

"We were supposed to finish this work before Christmas, but the place of the explosion became very weak," Shabbah said. "I had to strengthen the foundation, so that delayed us to some extent."

Shabbah will attend St. George on Christmas, although he's not a member of the church. Even Father Vincent is Chaldean Christian, not Greek Catholic -- he presides at the church because there's no one else to do it. That's not unusual in Iraq, where most Christian churches welcome people from other denominations.

For some Iraqi Christians, Christmas is celebrated on Jan. 6 instead of Dec. 25. Yusef, an Armenian Christian using a pseudonym to protect his identity, said he planned to go that day to his church club, where men and women can dance together and drink alcohol uninhibited by their more conservative Muslim neighbors.

He admitted he was worried about safety, even though the church club is only five minutes from his house.

"I don't know the situation of the country," he said. "Two years ago, we postponed our Christmas party because we would be drinking, and Muslims don't think the same way we think."