Source: The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/05/international/middleeast/05syria.html
On August 5, 2004 The New York Times reported, "[A]ttacks on Iraq's tiny Christian minority have been steadily increasing since late spring, culminating in the bombing of five Christian churches in Baghdad and Mosul on Sunday. As a result, according to the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, Christians are now fleeing the country in record numbers. Ajmal Khybari, an official at the refugee agency's Damascus office, said about 4,000 Iraqi families had registered as refugees in Syria. Although they represent less than 5 percent of Iraq's population, Iraqi Christians now make up about 20 percent of the total refugee flow into Syria from Iraq, Mr. Khybari said. Rita Zekert, the coordinator of the Caritas Migrant Center, a Catholic charity in Damascus that provides food, medicine and other aid to new refugees, said last year's wartime influx of Iraqi refugees included Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Christians and Kurds in percentages roughly proportionate to their numbers in Iraq. 'But nowadays, 95 percent of the people coming to us are Iraqi Christians,' Ms. Zekert said...Despite the growing frequency of attacks and humiliations, the leaders of Iraq's Christians are urging their members to remain in Iraq or, if they have already left, to return...'Iraq is in a new stage of its history,' Emmanuel Khoshaba, a spokesman for the Assyrian Democratic Movement, a political party of Iraq's Assyrian Christians, said. 'We have free speech, and places in the national assembly. Chaldeans and Assyrians are some of Iraq's most ancient people. It will be terrible if they leave before we can taste the fruits of Iraq's democracy.'"