Source: The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0306/p01s05-wogn.html
The bullets lay on the desk amid Bibles and rosaries. They're for two pistols owned by Father Ayman Danna.
"The only solution left for our people is to bear arms. We either live or die. We must be strong," says the Syriac Catholic priest at the Church of Saint George in Bartella, a northern Iraqi town in a swath of fertile land called the Nineveh Plain that now has the largest concentration of a dwindling Christian community.
The Christians who fled sectarian persecution that followed the US invasion in 2003 are now battling to hold onto one of their final refuges. They are increasingly besieged by Sunni Arab militants on one side and by Kurdish ultranationalists on the other – both of whom have different agendas for the area.