TO REACH her church to celebrate Good Friday today, Sameera Girgis will be smuggled on to a bus at a secret location, walk through a chicane of razor wire, and submit to a body search by gunmen guarding the Evangelical Protestant Church in central Baghdad. Security teams will check even her Bible to ensure that there is no bomb inside.

“In Baghdad you pray watched over by Kalashnikovs, not angels,” she says with a shrug of her shoulders.

Dr Girgis realises that she will risk her life attending services this Easter, but the 42-year-old university lecturer insists that the insurgents will not scare her away as they have thousands of her fellow Christians in Iraq.

A neighbour and university colleague from the suburb of Azamiyah, north of Baghdad, was shot dead on his doorstep three months ago for organising the clandestine Sunday ten-mile bus trips to church.

Eight months ago insurgents bombed ten churches in Baghdad and others in Mosul, killing a dozen worshippers during Sunday services.

Religious leaders say that barely half of Iraq’s 700,000 Christians, who were protected under Saddam Hussein, remain in the country as militias linked to some of the ruling parties try to impose Islam by force.

A few days ago Pastor Ikram Mahanna, leader of the Evangelical Protestant Church, was visited by a handful of men in uniform, urging him to employ more armed guards over Easter. He is unsure whether that was genuine advice from would-be protectors, or a threat. In Baghdad friends and foes wear identical uniforms.

He sifts through photographs of Easter services past, when he expected to see 600 faces in front of him. Today he will be grateful if 60 make it.

“If there is a bomb in their neighbourhood the bus drivers will not go and people will not leave their homes,” he says sitting in his office behind the church’s barricaded main gate.

A huge figure with an engaging laugh, Pastor Ikram, 61, tries to protect his congregation as best he can by varying the times of services, and using coded messages to arrange the pick-up points for the buses he sends to collect his flock.

He is considering whether to play a CD of his celebrated children’s choir at the services because he does not know how many choristers will show up.

A curfew means midnight Mass will be held mid-afternoon, and the Easter party he planned has been cancelled.

A church has stood on this site since 1840, and the present imposing bell tower is a local landmark. It has proved to be a tempting target for local mortar teams, Pastor Ikram says with a grin.

The pastel-coloured stained glass windows have been shattered by a bomb and replaced — Christians abroad pump money to their fellow believers in Iraq. But he shakes his head at the ugly barricades and barbed wire disfiguring the front of his church. He is uncomfortable about having armed men on the premises but describes it as “a necessary evil”. Last year police disarmed a suicide bomber outside.

But Pastor Ikram says that in recent weeks Baghdad’s shrinking Christian community has enjoyed a respite; the Shia and Sunni communities have been too engaged in annihilating one another to bother about Christians. It is a relative calm. He has buried ten of his congregation in the past few months — all victims of violence — and watched many more abandon Baghdad for good.

His wife and three daughters have returned to his native Egypt, and after eight years ministering here Pastor Ikram is considering joining them. “I know I should believe in the best in mankind, but I feel pessimistic about our future.”

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