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Iraqi deaths up 30 percent last month

The number of Iraqis killed last month rose by 33 percent over the previous month, reversing a six-month trend of fewer casualties, ministerial figures showed yesterday.

The combined figures obtained from the interior, defense and health ministries showed that the total number of Iraqis killed last month was 721, including 636 civilians, compared with 541 dead in January, the data showed.

It reverses the six-month trend of a steady fall in casualties across the country on the back of a massive US and Iraqi military assault.

The month's death toll is up from 541 in January, 568 in December, 606 in November, 887 in October, 917 in September and 1,856 in August.

The number of people wounded last month was 847.

January's death toll reached a 23-month low, with US commanders saying that all types of attacks were down to levels not seen before the February 2006 bombing of a Shiite shrine in the town of Samarra that triggered a wave of violence.

Meanwhile, in the northern city of Mosul, a Chaldean Catholic archbishop was kidnapped by gunmen on Friday after a shootout that killed his three companions, a local Iraqi army commander said.

Faraj-Farraj Rahhu, the archbishop of Mosul, was kidnapped after a shootout in the eastern Nur district of the city, Brigadier General Khalid Abd al-Sattar said.

Two bodyguards and his driver were killed, Sattar said.

Pope Benedict XVI swiftly condemned the kidnapping as an "atrocious act which touches the whole of the church" in Iraq, and expressed his "bitterness," a statement from the Vatican said, calling it a premeditated attack.

The pope also expressed solidarity with the head of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Iraq, Patriarch Emmanuel III Delly, and all the Christian community as well as the families of the victims, it added.

Rahhu, seized while on his way home after a religious ceremony, was the latest in a long line of Christian clerics to be abducted in Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003.

The Syrian-Catholic Archbishop of Mosul, Monsignor Basil Georges Casmoussa, was kidnapped in January 2005 and held for a day before being released.

Other church officials were not so lucky. Early last June Chaldean priest Ragheed Ganni, 31, and three of his assistants were shot dead outside the Holy Spirit Church in Mosul.

At the time the pope sent a telegram to Rahhu to express sadness over the "senseless killings."

Three days later another Chaldean priest, Hani Abdel Ahad, and five of his parishioners were kidnapped in Baghdad.

In October two Iraqi Roman Catholic priests, Pius Affas and Mazen Ishoa, from Mosul were released alive and well after more than a week in captivity, during which the kidnappers demanded a ransom of US$1 million.

It was not clear if any money was handed over.

Iraq's Christians, with the Chaldean rite by far the largest community, were said to number as many as 800,000 before the invasion nearly five years ago.

Associated with the "Crusader" invaders and regarded as well-off, they are now victims of sectarian cleansing, killings and kidnappings at the hands of both Sunni and Shiite Islamists, as well as criminal gangs.

Their churches have been bombed and homes confiscated.

On Jan. 6 a series of bombs exploded outside churches and a monastery in Mosul, in an apparently coordinated attack that wounded four people and damaged buildings, as Christians celebrated Epiphany.

Without their own militia to defend them, the Chaldean community is believed to have shrunk to half its previous number, with more joining the exodus each day, although in far smaller numbers than Iraq's vast Muslim majority.

In November Pope Benedict XVI elevated the 80-year-old Delly to the rank of cardinal and said during the ceremony that he sought by this act to show in a "concrete way my spiritual closeness and affection" for Iraqi Christians.
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