MOSUL, Iraq – As priests do everywhere, Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho, the leader of the Chaldean Catholics in this ancient city, gathered alms at Sunday Mass. But for years the money, a crumpled pile of multicolored Iraqi dinars, went into an envelope and then into the hand of a man who had threatened to kill him and his entire congregation.
“What else could he do?” asked Ghazi Rahho, a cousin of the archbishop. “He tried to protect the Christian people.”
But American military officials now say that as security began to improve around Iraq last year, Rahho, 65, stopped paying the protection money, one sliver of the frightening larger shadow of violence and persecution that has forced hundreds of thousands of Christians from Iraq.
That decision, the officials say, may be why he was kidnapped in February. Two weeks later, his body was found in a shallow grave outside Mosul, the biblical city of Nineveh.
Rahho was among the highest-profile Iraqi Christians to die in the war. He was mourned by President Bush and Pope Benedict XVI before his role as a conduit for protection money paid by the Chaldean Christians to insurgents became known outside Iraq.
These payments, American military officials and Iraqi Christians say, peaked from 2005 to 2007 and grew into a source of financing for the insurgency. They became a secret, shameful and extraordinary complication in the lives of Iraq's Christians and their leaders – one that Christians are only now talking about more openly, with violence much lower than in the first years of the war.
“People deny it, people say it's too complex, and nobody in the international community does anything about it,” said Canon Andrew White, the Anglican vicar of Baghdad. Complicating the issue further, he said, some of the protection money came from donations by Christians abroad to help their fellow Christians in Iraq.
Yonadam Kanna, a Christian lawmaker in Iraq's parliament, said, “All Iraqi Christians paid.”
For more than 1,000 years, northern Iraq has been shared by people who for the most part believe and worship differently: Turkmen, Kurds, Yazidis, Sunni and Shiite Arabs, and Assyrian Christians – of whom the Chaldeans are the largest denomination. (The Chaldean Church, an Eastern Rite church, is part of the Roman Catholic Church but maintains its own customs and liturgy.)
Since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, Muslims in the Middle East permitted that diversity in part through a special tax on Jews and Christians. The tax was called a jizya – and that is the name with which the insurgents chose to cloak extortion, Mafia-style, from Christians.
Officials say the demands could be hundreds of dollars a month per male member of a household. In many cases, Christian families drained their life savings and went into debt to make the payments. Insurgents also raised money by kidnapping priests. The ransoms, often paid by the congregations, typically ran as high as $150,000, several priests and lay Christians said.
In a paradox, this city, long the seat of Iraqi Christianity, also became known as the last urban stronghold of Sunni insurgents. Another, more painful, paradox is that many of Iraq's remaining Christians paid to save their lives, knowing full well that the money would be used for bombs and other weapons to kill others.
The fighting has taken another toll. The Christian population of Iraq has fallen to roughly 700,000 from a prewar estimate of 1.3 million.
