He drives to church in an armourplated car, escorted by 25 members of the Iraqi Army. As he preaches, he and his congregation are protected by soldiers cradling machineguns. Each week, familiar faces disappear — kidnapped, abducted or blown up by a suicide bomber. And each week politicians, generals, Muslim clerics and desperate mothers stream in to St George’s Anglican church to beg the help of an English vicar in ending violence, promoting dialogue and negotiating the release of hostages. For Canon Andrew White, fighting for peace has an all too literal meaning. His parish is the most murderous in the world: Baghdad.

He knows that he could be killed any day, but insists that the thought has never once troubled him. He takes few unnecessary risks, however. As the violence steadily grew worse in 2005, 11 of his church staff were kidnapped, shot or simply disappeared. Reluctantly, at the British Ambassador’s urging, he left his riverside house and moved into the fortified green zone and a trailer in an underground car park. It became too dangerous even to officiate at St George’s: services were held either in the Prime Minister’s office (a tribute to the esteem in which a Shia Muslim held this English Anglican) or that of an Iraqi friend. Baptisms were often conducted with a red plastic washing-up bowl.

In a book just published, detailing his efforts to bring reconciliation to Iraq, he makes it clear how parish life differs from his earlier work on international peacemaking at Coventry Cathedral. “All of us have faced serious death threats. I have had to flee Iraq on several occasions — most recently in July 2007 when pictures of me were posted up around Baghdad with the caption ‘Wanted dead or alive’.”

Things have eased slightly. On his return later that year he could go back to St George’s, although escorted by a private security company. The congregation numbered more than 1,000, one of the largest in the country, a figure that has now doubled to 2,000. Few were Anglicans, but White welcomed all the Orthodox, Catholics, Presbyterian, Chaldeans and other small sects driven out of their neighbourhoods by the violence. “They are all more than welcome to stay until they feel it safe enough to go back to their own churches,” he said. Borrowing a little of the ceremony of each, he conducts the liturgy in Arabic, having mastered enough of the language in more than a decade in Iraq. Prayers are in Aramaic. But he preaches still in English, pausing for translation.

It is still too dangerous for foreigners, however. White holds separate services in a chapel in the green zone for US and British soldiers, diplomats and others. Nor can he yet wander the streets or visit his flock in safety. The military surge has made a difference, but Iraq is still a far cry from the time when he first went there in 1998, encouraged by Tariq Aziz, the Christian who was Saddam Hussein’s Foreign Minister, to reopen the church after 14 years of neglect.

Despite the terrible aftermath, White still supports the overthrow of Saddam. He has heard enough of torture — of colleagues who had their eyes gouged out or families where the wife was raped and the three-year-old son’s head smashed against the wall — to see the depths of evil. He relates in his book how he agreed once to have dinner with Uday and Qusay, Saddam’s two “odious” sons, only because the intermediaries’ families would all be shot if he refused.

White insists that classic well-wishing liberalism would never work in Iraq. One of his main challenges has been the attempt to negotiate the freedom of hostages. That meant, very often, meeting killers, terrorists and criminals or dealing with militias.

“In Iraq, to be honest, I have learnt that the established strategies for resolving conflict — working through political issues, restoring civil society, supporting the moderates, involving women — are mostly ineffectual.” What mattered more was understanding the culture and mindset of those responsible for violence. He has met Iraqis from all factions except al-Qaeda, which, he says, has no interest at all in any form of reconciliation.

To date, he and his team have been involved in negotiations on 142 victims of kidnapping. Ninety-eight were seized for money, and 30 were released. The other 44 were abducted for political reasons, and of these only nine were freed. Negotiations took a long time and often ended in failure.

“Peacemaking of the old woollyliberal kind no longer works,” he writes. And the US military, he says, is vital to any effort. “Many people object to the idea that military action has an important role in peace- making, but I believe it more strongly now than ever.”

But he insists that religious figures are central to politics in Iraq. There is, in Iraqi eyes, no distinction. He is trusted and respected, he believes, because he is ordained — and because he belongs to no faction. His work in encouraging reconciliation has high backing — by Lord Carey of Clifton, the former Archbishop of Canterbury and a personal mentor, by Shia and Sunni clergy, by the Iraqi Government, US commanders and by President Bush himself, who wrote to him, just before leaving office last week, to “thank you for helping our people and sharing the Almighty’s love with the people of Baghdad”. But it takes a personal toll. “So much of my time is spent with unpleasant people, and so before I approach them I simply pray, ‘Lord, help me to love them!’ ”

White’s wife and two sons live in Hampshire. And he himself is far from well, having been given a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. He knows the likely progression of MS — he trained at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, as an operating department practitioner specialising in anaesthetics before giving up medicine to go to theological college in Cambridge.

He sums up his unusual posting, his closeness to Muslims and his pride in not being a Christian “moderate” with a touching bluntness. “People ask me why I spend so much time in places such as Gaza and Baghdad. The truth is, because that is where I am sent. And so I am never afraid . . . because I have an uncomplicated, almost childlike faith in God. The more I have done this type of work, and the more I have struggled with the reality of death and destruction, the more I have had to put my trust simply in my Lord and my God.

“I was not sent to Baghdad by the Church; I felt I was sent by God.”

The Vicar of Baghdad by Andrew White (Times Books, £8.54)