Churches in Turkey to be Renovated

Courtesy of the Turkish Daily News
25 March 2006

A decision made by Turkey's Foundations Department to renovate six churches, one monastery and a synagogue was praised by minority community leaders on Friday.

Among the sites slated for renovation are places of worship belonging to the Greek Orthodox, Syriac Christian, Greek Catholic, Armenian Orthodox and Jewish faiths.

The Foundations Department began its review of important sites around the country two years ago and produced an emergency action plan involving 750 heritage buildings out of 18,500 such sites in Turkey.

Turkey's Armenian Patriarch Mesrob II praised the Foundations Department's decision, adding, “This shows there is no discrimination.”

He said it was a goodwill gesture he hoped would continue into the future.

The Plight of Iraqi Christians

Courtesy of the New Republic
3 April 2006
By Lawrence F. Kaplan

Fadi has had it with Iraq. At his family's home in Baghdad, the Christian university student (whose last name has been withheld to protect his family) elaborates in fluent English. "There is no future for Christians here," he says. He knows this firsthand. Last year, four men drove up to his family's house and snatched his twelve-year-old nephew off the street.

Targeted for riches that few of them actually possess, Christians routinely disappear from the sidewalks of Baghdad. "We have no militia to defend us, and the government--they do nothing," Fadi says. A day after the abduction, the captors phoned Fadi's family, demanding $30,000. If his family failed to cobble together the ransom, Fadi knew what would come next. His nephew would be shot or beheaded.

After Iraq's Baathists seized power in 1968, they celebrated by stringing Jews up in a Baghdad square. With the remnant of Iraq's Jewish population having long since fled the country, Christians have become today's victims of choice. Sunni, Shia, and Kurd may agree on little else, but all have made sport of brutalizing their Christian neighbors, hundreds of whom have been slaughtered since the U.S. invasion. As a result, Iraq's ancient Christian community, now numbering roughly 800,000 and consisting mostly of Eastern rite Chaldean Catholics and Assyrian Orthodox Christians, dwindles by the day. According to Iraqi estimates, between 40,000 and 100,000 have fled since 2004, many following their own road to Damascus across the Syrian border or to Jordan, while many more have been displaced within Iraq. As for the country that loosed the furies against them, the United States refuses to provide Iraqi Christians protection of any kind.

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From his synod in Baghdad, the most prominent Christian clergyman inIraq, Chaldean Patriarch Emmanuel Delly, denies the obvious. "There is no persecution of Christians," the septuagenarian archbishop insists. "All Iraqis have problems." The fiction has become canonical among Iraqi Christian leaders, who maintain it to avoid inciting their tormentors. Many members of Iraq's clergy, for example, dismiss as gross exaggeration reports that tens of thousands of Christians have fled Iraq.

But, however much the clergy may deny it, Iraqi Christians suffer for their faith. Along with kidnappings and assassinations, church bombings--beginning with the destruction of five churches in August 2004--have become a staple of Christian life in Iraq. To disguise their faith, Christian women, particularly in Iraq's south, tuck their hair under hijabs, while fewer and fewer attend church, performing Mass in homes and sometimes, like their ancient Christian ancestors, in crypts instead. Even the Kurds, so often depicted as saints in Iraq's morality tale, have taken to pummeling Christians; the Kurdish religious affairs minister said last year that "those who turn to Christianity pose a threat to society."

Commenting on a recent pogrom against Christian students in Mosul, Yonadam Kanna, the only Christian elected to Iraq's new parliament, says, "The fanatics blame us for doing nothing. They blame us for being Christian."

The blame accrues, in part, because of real and imagined ties to the West and to the Western power occupying Iraq. There is, in truth, a cultural affinity between Iraqi Christians, many of whom speak English (and, as such, account for a large percentage of the U.S. military's interpreters), and the mostly Christian soldiers occupying their country. "[Local Christians] were very supportive of having us in Mosul," says Colonel Mike Meese, who served with the 101st Airborne Division in the heavily Christian city. "They'd have our soldiers go to Mass with them." But, as soon as their American protectors departed, the city's Christians became targets--their churches sacked and their archbishop kidnapped. In Baghdad, too, insurgents routinely execute Christians who work alongside the Americans. Threatened by her neighbors, a Christian friend of mine who worked in the Green Zone quit her job and today rarely leaves her house.

To the lengthy indictment of Christians, their persecutors have also added the charge of proselytizing. Unlike American soldiers, who mean to save Iraqi lives, the American evangelicals who followed on their heels mean to save Iraqi souls. There is a difference. Evangelizing to Iraqis carries with it risks that evangelizing to, say, Latin Americans does not. The infusion of pamphlets and missionaries from organizations like the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention enrages Iraqi Muslims, who, Iraqi Christian leaders claim, increasingly conflate their congregants with "the crusaders"--and, too often, treat them as such.

"The evangelicals have caused such problems for us," says Kanna. "They make the Sunni and Shia furious."

Even though Iraq's Christians suffer in the name of their American co-religionists, their fate seems not to have made the slightest impression on much of the evangelical establishment. Their websites and promotional literature advertise the importance of creating new Christian communities in Iraq while mostly ignoring the obligation to save ancient ones. Nor, with a few exceptions, have mainstream church leaders in the United States broached the subject, either. Dr. Carl Moeller, the president of Open Doors USA, an organization that supports persecuted Christians abroad, pins the blame on Christianity's own sectarian rifts. "The denominations in Iraq aren't recognized by Americans," he explains. "The underlying attitude is, 'They're not us.'"

The abysmal plight of Iraq's Christians, needless to say, long predates the arrival of the Americans. Since the first century, when Christianity first came to Nineveh province, Iraqi Christians have been cursed by geography.

With its fields of mud burnt red by the sun, much of Nineveh--the ancestral home to a large number of Assyrian Christians that runs from Mosul to the Syrian border in Iraq's northwest corner--resembles a Martian landscape.

Thousands of feet above the plains, a small U.S. outpost atop the Sinjar mountain range shines at night, a beacon to many of the Christians, Yazidis, and other persecuted minorities who populate the province below, a number of whom initially greeted the Americans as their saviors. But, having been massacred over the centuries by Ottomans, Kurds, and Arabs alike, most Christians know better than to rely on the goodwill of others.

Nor is this knowledge merely the result of their experiences under foreign rule. Even though the Christian presence in Iraq predates the arrival of Islam, in the Iraqi Muslim imagination, Christians will always be emissaries of the West. Because they operate a disproportionate share of Iraq's liquor, music, and beauty shops--industries deemed sinful in various interpretations of Islam--insurgents accuse them of embodying the licentiousness of all things American and have burned hundreds of liquor stores to the ground. Where Iraq was once awash in pop music CDs sold by Christian vendors, a more recent CD circulating in Mosul features the beheading of Christians.

It was against this backdrop that Fadi's family raced to save his kidnapped nephew from a similar fate. Luckily, Fadi's father, a doctor, was able to produce the $30,000 ransom. Eight days after his abduction, the captors released Fadi's nephew. But the ordeal shook his family so badly that, a month later, they spirited the boy off to Jordan. "If, today, we all had a place to go, tomorrow there wouldn't be a Christian left in Iraq," Fadi says.

As for Fadi himself, who first applied to leave Iraq in 1998 while Saddam Hussein was in power, last year's kidnapping made him even more anxious to flee. With the doors to the United States sealed shut, he placed his faith in other Western countries. While over 40,000 Iraqi Christians have fled their homeland since the invasion, last year the United States permitted fewer than 200 Iraqis to immigrate. As for the thousands of remaining Christian refugees, until recently, the U.N.'s High Commissioner for Refugees didn't even bother referring their cases to the United States, knowing we had no inclination to take them in.

Their case files amount to proof of Washington's callousness. There is the Iraqi American whose Christian sister saw her husband gunned down in the street. Following the assassination of two more family members, the sister fell into a crippling depression, unable to care for her two-year-old child. Caught up in a bureaucratic tangle, her American relatives have gotten exactly nowhere. Another sister of an Iraqi American, a Christian woman with four children, lost her husband, killed while serving as a U.S. military interpreter. Her family, too, has been reduced to pleading her case before unconcerned State Department officials. A heartfelt advocate for Iraqi Christians, Representative Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat from Illinois, calls embassies, by her account, "at all hours of the night," but "the policy since the war began is, 'We're not granting asylum.' ... There is no processing of refugees from Iraq." The reasons derive from post-September 11 security restrictions and, in the telling of a senior administration official, from the fiction that Iraqis, now liberated, no longer endure systematic persecution.

Fortunately for Fadi, other Western governments have offered a more candid assessment, and, after seven years of waiting, one just informed him he will be granted his visa. He can barely contain his glee. "I feel happy because I go to a new place where I feel free," he says.

But his case counts as a rare exception. Before leaving Baghdad last month, I got a taste of the desperation felt by Iraqi Christians left behind.

Samira, a sad woman in her fifties who comes once a day to cook for an Iraqi friend, showed me a photograph of a woman in her thirties. She had a favor to ask: Would I marry her daughter? The proposition had nothing to do with me, per se. She simply wants to get her Christian daughter out of Iraq.

Last year, insurgents murdered Samira's son. As a sign of respect, his Muslim friends transported the body to Najaf for burial in the Shia holy city. A kind gesture, to be sure, but Samira wants her son buried in a Christian cemetery. The son's Shia friends refuse to surrender his body, and, not being Muslim herself, there is no one to whom she can effectively--or safely--plead her case. Like most Iraqi Christians, she has nowhere to turn.

A Communiqué of the Assyrian Church of the East -
Western U.S. Dioceses

For Immediate Release
15 March 2006
Los Angeles, California

Communiqué of the Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East
Clergy Council of the Dioceses of the Western U.S.A.

By the abundant mercies of Jesus Christ our Lord and God, and with the blessing of His Holiness Mar Dinkha IV, Catholicos-Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East all of the parish priests of the dioceses of the Western California under the jurisdiction of His Grace Mar Odisho Oraham and the Western U.S.A. under the jurisdiction of His Grace Mar Aprim Khamis of the Assyrian Church of the East gathered in council from 13 to 15 March 2006 at the premises of the St. Mary’s Assyrian Church, Los Angeles, California. The council sessions were held in an intense spirit of prayer, brotherly love, charity and collaboration under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

The clergy who attended the council from both dioceses are as follows:

1. Very Rev. Archdeacon Nenos Michael, parish priest of Mar Narsai Parish (San Francisco) and the representative of His Grace Mar Odisho Oraham, bishop of the Western California diocese;
2. Rev. Auchana Kanon, parish priest of Mar Gewargis Parish (Ceres);
3. Rev. Jameel Wardah, parish priest of Mar Addai Parish (Turlock);
4. Rev. Kando Kando, parish priest of Mar Zaia Parish (Modesto);
5. Rev. George Bet-Rasho, parish priest of St. Mary’s Parish (Los Angeles);
6. Rev. Fredrick Hermiz, parish priest of Mar Patros Parish (Phoenix);
7. Rev. Antwan Latchen, interim-parish priest of Mar Yosip Parish (San Jose);
8. Rev. David Royel, St. Mary’s Parish (Los Angeles);
9. Rev. Gabriel Brakhia, parish priest of Mar Polos Parish (Orange County);
10. Rev. Khoshaba Shleemon, parish priest of Rabban Hurmizd Parish (San Diego);
11. Rev. Aprim Younadam, parish priest of Mar Benyamin Shimun Parish (Las Vegas), prevented from attending but standing in solidarity with the Clergy Council.

Assyrian Church of the East parish priests of the dioceses of the Western California under the jurisdiction of His Grace Mar Odisho Oraham and the Western U.S.A. under the jurisdiction of His Grace Mar Aprim Khamiswho atteneded a recent gathering between 13 and 15 March 2006 in Los Angeles, California.

The Clergy Council deliberated on a number of vital issues facing the Assyrian Church of the East at large in the present days. The major issues discussed were the status of the youth associations of the various parishes, the attendance of the faithful for Church services and the various other activities and building projects in which the parishes are engaged. We give glory to God to see that numerous signs indicate success and a surge of support from the faithful at large of their Holy Church under the guidance of His Holiness Mar Dinkha IV, Catholicos-Patriarch. The Clergy Council further deliberated on issues that are presently at odds with the Church, and we pray that all the faithful of the Church join us in fasting during this holy, penitential season of the Lord’s Fast that God’s peace may once again reign in the hearts of all so that these bleak clouds may pass from the Holy Church. It was reiterated that the Church’s doors and arms are open to all her children, and She calls all to be reconciled and to be counted once more as Her children, born and re-generated through Her bosom in the Sacrament of Holy Baptism. We too would ask that the faithful of the Church respect one another as brothers and sisters in the one and same Lord—Jesus Christ.

The Clergy Council would like to call all of the faithful sons and daughters of the Assyrian Church of the East to publicly and actively demonstrate their support for the Church of their forefathers—the Church of two millennia of martyrdom and witness to the salvific message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ! This support does not exclude the Holy Church’s respect for other Christian denominations, rather it is a living witness that the Assyrian Church has a unique place in the history of Christendom, and an equally unique role to play in the ecumenical dialogue in which the various Churches are engaged. Our message is one of peace, harmony and Christian fraternity among all the followers of Jesus Christ.

The Council further exhorts all Assyrian organizations, political parties and associations to be mediums of harmony and fraternity among all Assyrians, irrespective of their ecclesiastical or political affiliation. Since their work is a labor of love for the future of our beloved Assyrian people and nation, we exhort the political parties and cultural associations to actively demonstrate this harmony and to practically promote it among all Assyrians. We respectfully ask that all personal slander and mud-slinging cease immediately among our Assyrian political groups and associations, and that their various media in the form of TV, radio and internet communications be used as forums to promote the general good of the Assyrian people and not as forums of invective and slander. We call upon all our politicians and political groups to equally refrain from unwarranted public slander and invective against all prelates and clergy, irrespective of their Church affiliation, and to rather be peacemakers sowing the good seed of unity and harmony among all Assyrians. Only by such practical means can we promote a genuine and enduring unity among our people.

Assyrian Church of the East Clergy Council of the Dioceses of the Western U.S.A.

Finally, all of us clergy who have met in an atmosphere of brotherly love these past few days would like to publicly demonstrate our undivided support for our beloved Church—the Assyrian Church of the East—under the guidance of His Holiness Mar Dinkha IV, Catholicos-Patriarch. We further demonstrate our support of the Holy Synod and any and all decrees which it may issue.

May the Grace and Peace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God the Father and the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all, forever; Amen.

Nuri Kino Awarded "Assyrian Of The Year" Prize

A report by Afram Barryakoub from Sweden

The multi-awarded journalist, Nuri Kino, was selected as the "2005 Assyrian of the Year" by the Assyrian Youth Federation of Sweden. The anouncement was made public during the annual meeting of the youth federation.

Assyrian journalist, Nuri Kino, is awarded the Assyrian Youth Federation of Sweden's "Assyrian of the Year" award.

The “Assyrian of The Year” prize is each year awarded to a person who has contributed to the betterment of the Assyrian nation. Two former winners are Gabriel Afram, author of the Swedish-Assyrian dictionary and Father Yusuf Akbulut, the priest who spoke out on the Assyrian genocide (Seyfo) in Turkey.

Many of Mr. Kino's articles in leading newspapers of Europe evolve around the situation of the Assyrian nation. His latest documentary about the famous Assyrian soccer team “Assyriska” is now competing in the Beverly Hills film festival. The youth federation presented the prize to Nuri Kino with the following words:   "With his razor sharp formulations, insight and knowledge he has, with his articles, newspaper reports, radio commentaries and TV documentaries, elevated the situation of the Assyrians to the international political arena..."

After recieving the prize and a check for ten thousand kronor (approx. $US 1300) Nuri Kino gave an emotional speech in which he emphasized the need to bring in more love in the Assyrian movement and to take care of one another. In the end, he announced that he is donating the entire check to Zelge, the fan club of the Assyrian football (soccer) team, “Assyriska”.

Nuri Kino also said:  “I have followed many Assyrian groups during the years but I have never come across a group that never, never gives up, even when everyone else gave up as Zelge has stood firm in its support and work for their team”.

Mr. Nuri Kino's documentary "Assyriska: A National Team without A Nation" will be competing at the Beverley Hills Film Festival between 6 and 8 April, 2006.  For more information click here.

3 Years of War Wither a Family's Seed of Hope

Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times
25 March 2006
By Louise Roug
Other Contributors were Borzou Daragahi and Shamil Aziz in Baghdad

(ZNDA:  Baghdad)   As U.S. forces made their way to the capital, Baher Butti sat alone in his house with the AK-47 that Baath Party officials had given him to guard his neighborhood. It was March 25, 2003, and the psychiatrist had just celebrated his 43rd birthday.

"The war on Iraq has started," he wrote in his diary. "I have not prepared myself to be a fighter but a doctor and a family man."

ISLAND OF NORMALITY: Balsam and Baher Butti and their 9-year-old daughter, Ula, live in a middle-class home in the Baghdad suburbs. The Buttis also have two sons, Sarmad, 17, and Fadhil, 20. Ula was injured when a bomb hit her school bus in May.  (Saad Khalaf / LA Times)

A man trained to heal the suffering of others, Butti would see trauma enter his own house in the three years to follow. Fighting and havoc would empty his church, claim the lives of friends and relatives and, finally, touch his 9-year-old daughter — leaving her scarred and traumatized after a bomb ripped through her school bus.

That March night, Butti described sneaking out from his forced guard duty to see his wife and three children at her father's home.

"I used a road that I thought was convenient to avoid the risk of bombings. I returned back very quickly to resume my duties," he wrote. "I am now in my house. I feel mentally exhausted."

Target practice had been part of Butti's high school curriculum, and Baath Party membership was almost mandatory for him to work as a doctor. But the idea of using a weapon to defend the regime repelled him.

"I feel afraid after I was put by the [party] in this silly role," he wrote. "I was overcome by the feeling of being a sheep on the way to the slaughterhouse."

Street fighting never came to his neighborhood. On April 6, Butti crossed the river and joined his family. Together on a rooftop they watched the tanks enter the city. His wife, Balsam, a more vociferous critic of Saddam Hussein's regime, greeted arriving U.S. soldiers with tea and biscuits.

The soldiers refused.

"We were so happy" that the soldiers had arrived, Balsam Butti recalled later. "But they were afraid of us."

Her husband, for his part, was bewildered by the sight of Americans riding their tanks through the streets of his city.

The idea that his country was occupied by foreigners made Butti uncomfortable. Still, a hope grew. With the Americans, perhaps a kind of progress would arrive.

Butti, a graduate of the Jesuit High School in Baghdad, quickly became involved in local politics, writing pamphlets and columns. He talked to journalists and pontificated on the meaning of democracy, tyranny and freedom.

He stopped keeping a diary. His writing — by necessity private during Hussein's regime — became public.

In June, three months after the invasion, Butti was still trying to articulate what was happening in his country.

"When people saw the statue [of Hussein] falling in Firdos Square, the mountains of oppression that were in their souls started to explode," Butti wrote with characteristic flair.

With Hussein gone, U.S. forces watched as Iraqis looted the city. Freedom meant "do what you feel like," he wrote.

He was still ambivalent about the Americans — "friend or an enemy?"

A few days after the invasion, his wife, an obstetrician, returned to her clinic. Their children, a girl and two boys, went back to school. And Butti resumed his job at Ibn Rushd Teaching Psychiatric Hospital, Baghdad's biggest mental hospital.

Psychiatry had been a neglected field in Iraq for decades. Butti and his colleagues maintained little contact with the outside world and relied on outdated theories and textbooks.

U.S. officials listened with sympathy but had no money for his project. Their priorities were first relief, then election campaigns and eventually security, he said.

As violence worsened, American and Iraqi officials moved into the Green Zone, a heavily fortified compound along the Tigris River. U.S. soldiers began to refer to the city outside as the "red zone." Baghdad was being divided.

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"We used to meet them outside the Green Zone," Butti said of U.S. officials. "Then things became that we had to go to the Green Zone [because] they couldn't go out. Then our entrance to the Green Zone became very difficult."

Outside the compound, gunmen took over streets, kidnapping and killing Iraqis. Doctors and academics in particular became targets. By 2004, many of the doctors who stayed in Iraq carried guns as they made their hospital rounds.

Leaving the house became a gamble, said Butti, who refused to arm himself for work.

Instead of progress, he and his wife saw advancing irrationality. Baher Butti — a slight, balding man with a bookish air — observed the proliferation of faith healers. Balsam Butti — composed, beautiful and partial to charcoal-colored suits — noticed that more women were giving birth at home, unable to make it to the hospital because of curfews or violence. As a result, more babies were stillborn and more women bled to death during labor, she said.

"Collectively speaking, we have regressed," Baher Butti said. "I'm a believer in God, but it doesn't make me superstitious. But our people are becoming superstitious."

Fundamentalism also took hold. Arsonists torched the Buttis' local library. Liquor store owners were assassinated. Three gunmen shot Balsam Butti's cousin in the stomach as he stood behind the counter of his convenience store. His family believes he was killed for selling beer.

Under Hussein's secular rule, Iraq's Christians were allowed to prosper and practice their faith without much trouble. At Christmas, Iraqi Muslims would go out caroling with their Christian neighbors.

But in the new Iraq, Christians in the Buttis' neighborhood received death threats and fled. By Christmas 2004, pews at their local church were half empty. Extremists targeted barbers for giving Western-style haircuts and violating strict Islamic teachings by trimming or removing men's beards. Baher Butti forbade his teenage son to wear his hair the way he wanted it — spiky.

Violence closed in. Their world was shrinking.

Friends left the country. The Buttis no longer went swimming at the Al Wiya Club in downtown Baghdad, now nearly deserted. Eventually, they stopped visiting relatives living outside the capital.

The retreat into their middle-class home in the Baghdad suburbs was bittersweet. Suddenly, there was more time with each other and their children — 9-year-old Ula and her two brothers, 17-year-old Sarmad and 20-year-old Fadhil. Baher and Balsam's marriage blossomed.

On most nights, the family would gather in their cozy living room, watching their favorite TV shows — "Friends" and "The West Wing." Shipwrecked by the upheaval around them, they clung to each other and their island of normality.

Baher refused his family's advice: Abandon Baghdad, move abroad and start a new life. He believed his roots in Iraq were too deep. His grandfather had served as a minister of culture. Baher wanted to build his own legacy — the Al Janna, or Paradise, clinic.

On May 7, 2005, a bright Saturday morning, Balsam was standing in the kitchen rolling up dolmas. The phone rang and Sarmad picked it up. After a brief conversation, he turned to his mother. "Mama, Ula is in danger," he said. "She is in Al Kindi Hospital."

A bomb had ripped through the school bus carrying Ula and seven other girls from Dijla Primary School. Balsam, otherwise unflappable, panicked. She frantically called Baher, who had taken their car for repairs. Rushing to the hospital in a taxi, Baher prayed incessantly for his daughter's survival.

At Al Kindi — a dirty, depleted hospital downtown — doctors had taken Ula for X-rays, examining the damage done to her freckled face. They stitched her wounds without anesthetics.

When Baher found Ula, he showered her bruised and bloodied face with kisses. He thanked God that shrapnel had slashed his daughter's nose rather than her eyes, that only her lips, not her throat, had been slit open. He swept her up and took her to a plastic surgeon, a family friend, who immediately treated the girl. Eventually, the scars would disfigure only Ula's skinny arms.

"That day," Balsam said, "she blamed me because she didn't want to go to school but I had forced her to go."

Ula's nightmares, which she often remembered the next morning, added to her mother's feelings of guilt.

"During the first month, every day she would give us a segment of the incident, a phrase here and a phrase there," Balsam said. "She used to say: 'There was a tank beside us, and the tank was hit. The driver was injured.' In another segment she said: 'The girl beside me was silent. Why was she silent? Did she die or not?' "

Although some were seriously injured, all seven girls survived.

Later her daughter told her, " 'I don't want to remember,' " Balsam said. " 'I don't remember and I don't want to remember.' "

Baher let his daughter be. Better that she forgets, he thought, even if he could not.

On a recent spring day in Baghdad, traffic was at a standstill as trucks unloaded mountains of generators and washing machines — goods once unobtainable in Iraq.

A hot dog vendor did brisk business underneath a sign advertising the South Korean company LG and its slogan, "Life's good." Down a side street, a group of boys played soccer in a dusty field.

Around the corner in a garden, six female doctors and healthcare workers sat in the shade, talking shop. Baher Butti was listening in on their discussion. Behind him, a sign spelled out "Al Janna" — Paradise.

He had finally built it.

An Iraqi advertising executive, looking for publicity, had donated $10,000. Baher used the money to buy a modest house, creating a refuge for the afflicted. Upstairs, in an empty studio, a patient had been working on a painting as part of his therapy. The half-finished piece on the aisle showed soldiers on horseback attacked by lions.

"It's a small place, but it's just the beginning," Baher said, mixing pride and apology.

For him, however, it was the end — a seed of hope he could no longer sustain. After Ula's school bus was hit, the Buttis decided to leave Iraq. As soon as Sarmad finishes his exams, they will join relatives in the United Arab Emirates.

But that decision ruptured the family bond that had strengthened during the last three years of violence.

The older son, Fadhil, has refused to leave, convinced that he and his friends will be able to change Iraq for the better.

"It's my country," Fadhil said. "This is the place I was born, and I want to die here. I don't want to go outside. We — the students — we will change it. It's our duty."