Iraq's Christians "sacrificial lambs" as attacks mount

Sun Oct 19, 2008
By Missy Ryan

AL-QOSH, Iraq (Reuters) - A Christian family huddles in an austere room in a monastery in northern Iraq, their belongings piled up around them. It is now home, since members of their religious minority became targets of sectarian attacks.

The father, an engineer who was so scared that he asked to keep his name and that of his family unidentified, rushed his wife and two daughters to the Chaldean Catholic al-Saida monastery at the foot of arid mountains in northern Iraq on October 9, a day after hearing that four fellow Christians were killed.

"The explosions continue. There is no safety," he says with his youngest daughter draped on his lap.

Such is the plight of some 1,500 Christian families who in the past two weeks have fled homes in Iraq's ethnically mixed, and stubbornly violent, city of Mosul. the rest