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Whether those reports were real or not, Mosul's Christians took the threats seriously. A thousand families piled their belongings into cars and fled. Some went deeper into the self-governing Kurdish region of Iraq, which has long been tolerant of Christians. Others fanned out to remote villages. The flight has exacerbated what Pary Karadaghi, an official at the U.S.-based Kurdish Human Rights Watch, calls an epic humanitarian crisis for Iraq's Christians. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians have been forced from their homes by spurts of religious violence in the five years since the U.S.-led invasion; many do not have access to food, water, and shelter as the cold winter approaches.

All this means that this year, Christmas in Iraq will be "low key," in Karadaghi's words.

Iraq's Christians once represented a thriving community that lived in relative peace alongside Muslims in both the Arab- and Kurdish-dominated parts of Iraq. But that was during Saddam Hussein's hard-line rule, when secret police and a powerful army mostly suppressed ethnic and religious tensions.

But that's not to say that Iraq was ever a truly safe place for Christians and other religious minorities. Christians — who at their peak accounted for around 5 percent of Iraq's 25 million people — have fared better than, say, Iraq's now-extinct Jewish community, but Christians have been "depleted over time," Hiltermann says. Rising Islamic extremism and ethnic tensions in the 1980s and '90s gradually forced many Christians out of the country. Then the war beginning in 2003 opened the floodgates for refugees. Today, there are some 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Syria alone — many of them Christians, Karadaghi says. (The Syrian government has put pressure on refugees to return to Iraq, and recently sealed the border to prevent new refugees arriving.) Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians are internally displaced, having fled their traditional homes for communities they perceive to be safer.

In years past, many Christian refugees were displaced by Hussein's campaign to seize land from Iraqi Kurds, an ethnic group that largely opposed his rule and forcibly ejected the Iraqi army from the northern quarter of the country. The oil-rich city of Kirkuk lies just south of the so-called Green Line that marked the northernmost reach of Hussein's army. To ensure that the Green Line did not creep south to encompass Kirkuk and its oil, Hussein launched the Enfal initiative, which stripped Kurds of their land and transferred it to Arab Muslim families loyal to Baghdad.

Enfal was officially long over by the time Hussein's government fell to U.S. troops, but it was only in the invasion's aftermath that many displaced Christians returned to Kirkuk to reclaim their land. Bitter legal battles resulted — battles that Christians are not favored to win. "Most of the files have been sent to Baghdad, and the government has systematically lost them," Karadaghi said. "Christians are having difficulty finding anything relevant to their property."

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December (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 53