Often viewed by their fellow citizens with suspicion, Iraq’s Anglicans lead a precarious existence
St. George’s Anglican Church in Baghdad—Iraq’s only Anglican church—has always offered a window into the state of things in this often troubled nation, which is still recovering from more than three decades of war, sanctions and invasions. Every time I come to Baghdad, I try to pay a visit, and over the years have gotten to know many of the parishioners, interviewing them about their everyday lives.
The church was built in 1936 as a memorial to British soldiers who died in Mesopotamia during World War I, and through the decades its congregation has shared the trials and tribulations of the Iraqi people.
Its struggles have also mirrored those of Iraqi Christians, who have a 2,000-year presence here. In this land steeped in biblical history, where St. Thomas the Apostle, according to legend, sojourned in the first century C.E. before travelling to the Malabar Coast in India, war and regime change have taken their toll on the Christian population, whose numbers have dwindled from 1.5 million in 2003 to a mere 150,000 today. Yet Iraqi Christians have always lived side by side with Muslims. As the Iraqi Chaldean patriarch Rafael Bedawan told me in 1998, “When American bombs fall, they don’t distinguish between Muslim and Christian.”
St. George’s was closed in 1991, after the first Gulf War, and lost some of its stained-glass windows—mementos of British regiments stationed there—when the United States military bombed a nearby building in 1992.
It reopened in 1998 after being restored following looting. It was badly damaged during the 2003 invasion of Iraq but soon opened again, this time as a centre for relief and reconciliation efforts, providing food, medical care, and educational support to the community. It was damaged once more in 2009 when the last three remaining stained-glass windows were blown out by suicide bomb blasts that destroyed three nearby Iraqi government buildings, killing several people and injuring dozens.
In addition to running a clinic and a school, it now also plays a role in interfaith dialogue. Located next to the Al Rashid Theatre and across from the Mansour Melia Hotel—two buildings put up during Baghdad’s early 80s glory days of public architecture before war with Iran, sanctions and invasions took their toll and they were also bombed and looted—it’s close to the Green Zone, home to many of the city’s government buildings and embassies. It was here that the church’s former rector, Canon Andrew White—dubbed “the vicar of Baghdad”—established the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East in 2005 as part of his work for peace in Iraq and the Middle East as a whole.
According to the foundation’s website, Canon White’s aim was to “gain trust of key religious leaders on both sides in various conflict areas.” White, who took part in negotiations surrounding the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 2002, previously led Coventry Cathedral’s International Centre for Reconciliation.
Sadly, in November 2014 then-Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby ordered him to leave Baghdad due to heightened security risks. While White supported the 2003 invasion, he has often said that he didn’t anticipate what horrors it would usher in. When the relatively secular nation experienced heightened sectarianism after the regime change, and the American occupiers rewrote the constitution along confessional lines, entrenching Sharia law in lieu of the old civil code, Christians often bore the brunt. Suddenly, churches were being firebombed by shadowy extremist groups, and many members of this ancient community began to flee their homeland.
In 2010, after the October massacre at the Syriac Catholic Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad that left 52 Christians dead, letters were delivered to the homes of the city’s Christians, including many at St. George’s, by an extremist group calling itself the Secret Islamic Army. According to White, they bore the message: “To the Christian: This is your last and final threat. If you do not leave your home, you and your family will be killed.”
Later, two elderly St. George’s parishioners were murdered in their homes. Many Baghdadis blamed armed gangs seeking cheap real estate in high value neighbourhoods; White blamed Al-Qaeda operatives, but he also said Islamophobic evangelists like Koran-burning U.S. pastor Terry Jones were a “disaster for Christians in the Middle East,” noting that extremisms feed off each other.
White’s legacy at St. George’s lives on. On my most recent visit in May, Canon Faiz Jerjes, the first and only Iraqi citizen ordained as an Anglican cleric, delivered a sermon themed around the message “judge not lest ye be judged” to a congregation that included several Yazidi women.
After the choir finished the service with a rousing rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in Arabic, I spoke with some of them.
They told me they’d been attending the church for three years. They come here because, they said, they love Jesus. They still went to the Yazidi temple when they visited Sinjar, in northern Iraq, but lived in Baghdad now, having fled ISIS in 2015.
Yasmin Elias, a woman in her 50s who works as a manager at the church, told me, “People from many religions come here—Muslims and Yazidis, Kurds and Arabs. We are sisters and brothers. We sit together and eat together. And our medical clinic is open for all for free. ”
Elias said that the congregation is slowly returning and that many Christians who fled their villages in the Nineveh Plain after ISIS occupied them are coming to Baghdad now. “But many Christians have left the country,” she told me.
Deacon the Rev. Rabia Haddad concurs; many Christians have left to seek their fortunes abroad. But since my last visit in October of 2023, when security was tight in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, things have improved for Christians, he said.
“It started with the visit of the Pope in 2021—that encouraged many Christians to come back,” Haddad says. Security has improved a lot now, he adds, thanks to efforts by Prime Minister Muhammad Shayya al-Sudani, in power since 2022. “Now we’re more confident and would rather stay than leave the country,” Haddad says.
Furthermore, the Arab League Summit, which was held this year in Baghdad and finished the day before my visit, he told me, effectively sent “a message to the world that Iraq is recovering and stable.”
Still, in spite of Haddad’s optimism, things seemed rather tense compared to my visit in 2022, when I spoke with parishioners for an hour, had coffee, exchanged selfies and was given WhatsApp numbers of relatives in Mississauga. The atmosphere was edgy during my visit in October 2023 of course, when regional geopolitics were on fire. But now, even Canon Jerjes, who has toured Anglican communities in North America and the U.K. extensively, and received a Member of the Order of the British Empire award in 2023 for his service to Iraqi Christians and Yazidis, told me when I asked for an interview for the Anglican Journal, “No, I don’t feel comfortable speaking to you.”
I wondered if this were a repeat of the Saddam days when everyone would say, “Saddam is good, everything is fine”—in contrast to the unvarnished truth I received from women on clandestine trips to the local beauty parlour, a conveniently all-female, minder-free zone, where the government spooks posing as “guides” for journalists dared not tread.
Eventually, before ushering me out of the church in a hurry, Elias said, “We are in a constant state of anxiety.” Even with the ever-present Iraqi army patrol guarding the entrance way, she told me, “We don’t feel comfortable. We don’t know what the future is for our children, for Christians in Iraq. We don’t know what will come next.”
As I write this on a Sunday morning in June, Israel and Iran exchange deadly fire. Iraq and especially its Christians are caught in the middle. Suspect because of their “Western” affiliations and yet often abandoned by their brethren in the West, they are once again between a rock and a hard place.
My texts to parishioner friends asking how their Sunday service went go unanswered. At times like these, silence is their only protection. But if the resilience of the congregation at St. George’s is any example, they will soon be back singing “Hallelujah.”
