By SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI

Associated Press

AIN KAWA, Iraq - For the Toma brothers, life was getting more precarious by the day. One of them had survived two shootings. Their cousin had been murdered. A CD of beheadings named them as American agents. "Long Live Saddam Hussein" and "Allahu Akbar" had been painted on their church. It was clearly time to flee.

Too late. As Hani and Khaled Toma backed out of the garage to make the two-hour drive from Mosul to the relative safety of Irbil on Sept. 2, a dozen gunmen riddled their red BMW with bullets, adding two more to the dozens of members of Iraq's tiny Christian community who have been murdered in Iraq's post-invasion blood bath.

Over the past year, about 100 families from Mosul have taken refuge in Ain Kawa, a small Christian suburb of the northern Kurdish city of Irbil. Hundreds more have fled to other Kurdish-protected villages and towns.

Photos of 33-year-old Hani and his brother Khaled, 31, hung on the walls of their family's home away from home. Their mother, Hassina Toma dug into a black plastic bag and produced the death certificates and police photos of her two sons slumped in the car.

She told of frantically banging on the doors of the hospital morgue to see their bodies, and of burying them quickly and furtively, hurried along by a priest fearful of attracting unwanted attention. Her surviving sons couldn't attend, so great was the risk. A quick prayer and it was over. "It all lasted less than a quarter of an hour," she said.

The funeral was held in Bartala, a town near Mosul where about 10 Christians have been murdered, including Tar Butros, the Tomas' 20-year-old cousin. She and two other women, cleaners at an American military base in Mosul, were gunned down as they traveled home from work by bus.

For the brothers, the most direct threat came in a CD titled "Spies" which was circulating in Mosul and showed three Christians being interrogated by a group calling itself the Salahudin al-Ayoubi Brigade and then decapitated. One of the victims claimed to be an informant for the Americans and named all five Toma brothers as collaborators.

The parents say Hani Toma was a businessman, and deny any of their sons worked for the Americans.

While they were burying their sons, the home in Mosul where they had lived for 40 years and in which all the boys were born was set on fire. Raad Toma, 32, had already been targeted twice, the first time on a July afternoon.

"I was chatting with friends on our street corner. Two masked men walked toward us and shot us with their pistols and fled," he said. He was hit in the stomach and the arm. Two of his friends were also injured.

A few weeks later, partially recovered, he went out into the street again. A car with five men inside drove by, opening fire on him and two other Christians. A bullet pierced his left leg, damaging a nerve. That's when he moved to Ain Kawa.

"I was afraid they would come to our house and kill us all," he said.

The Toma family lived in Al Sa'ah, long a predominantly Christian neighborhood of Mosul but in recent years home to increasing numbers of Muslims.

"There are a lot of Wahhabis there now, watching us," Raad Toma said, referring to adherents of the puritan form of Islam preached by Osama bin Laden. He said he had seen a wall poster in the neighborhood saying, "Killing of Christians and Jews is required as soon as possible."

Christians are believed to make up just 3 percent of Iraq's 26 million people - most of them Catholics, Assyrians and Chaldeans, the denomination to which the Tomas belong. Officials estimate that as many as 15,000 Iraqi Christians have left the country since August, when four churches in Baghdad and one in Mosul were attacked in coordinated car bombings. Twelve people died and 61 were wounded. Another church was bombed in Baghdad in September.

Father Danha Toma, of the Saint Joseph Church in the Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah, belongs to a committee for Christians in need of refuge. Toma said 700 families in Mosul, Baghdad and the southern city of Basra have applied, but he lacks funds and lodgings to relocate them.

Even in cases where justice is done, the dangers persist. The man who knifed Sonya Nasri's husband to death and injured her 24-year-old son was caught, tried and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Muslim custom gives the victim's family a say in the sentencing, and the perpetrator's father demanded that Nasri agree to a shorter prison term. When she refused, he threatened in open court to kill her son Ghaydan in revenge.

"My lawyer told me to leave quickly through the back door and take a taxi to Irbil. I wasn't even present when the sentence was read out," the black-clad widow said. She fled Mosul for Irbil in June 2003.

Nasri's husband, Wilson, was a liquor salesman, and after Saddam was toppled he started getting death threats as hard-liners emerged to enforce the Islamic ban on alcohol.

The role of Iraqi Christians in the marketing of alcohol is one reason they have come under threat. Also, Christians are viewed as wealthy, making them more likely to be kidnapped for ransom.

More dangerous, perhaps, is the notion that they are friendly toward their American co-religionists and therefore are "Crusaders" bent on destroying Islam. "They see us as being hand-in-hand with the Americans," said Father Toma, who is not related to the Toma brothers. "It is a wrong label."

"Unfortunately, they've turned it into a war against the Crusaders and are taking it back to the Middle Ages," he said, adding that churches in Iraq haven't been attacked since the Mongols destroyed Baghdad in the 13th century.

Christians participated enthusiastically in Iraq's Jan. 30 election, and although mainstream Muslim leaders have denounced the attacks on them, Raad Toma expects the vote will result in "extremist Islamists" taking power. He says they have already infiltrated the Iraqi security forces and "they will come after us and will help the criminals."

He says he needs surgery for the gunshot wound that has left him with a limp, and wants to leave Iraq,

"Things are going to get much worse for Christians," he said.