Iraq violence stymies faith

WASHINGTON -- Religious freedom has sharply deteriorated in Iraq over the past year because of the insurgency and violence targeting people of specific faiths, despite the U.S. military buildup intended to improve security, a State Department report said Friday.

The Annual Report on International Religious Freedom found the violence is not confined to the well-known rivalry between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

"The ongoing insurgency significantly harmed the ability of all religious believers to practice their faith," said the report released by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

In her remarks, Rice did not specifically address the situation in Iraq but said the report, covering 198 countries, was an important element of President Bush's efforts to promote religious freedom worldwide.

"Freedom of religion is integral to efforts to combat the ideology of hatred and intolerance that fuels global terrorism," she said.

Rice did not answer reporters' questions and turned the presentation over to John Hanford, the department's ambassador at large for international religious freedom, who also did not mention Iraq in his opening remarks.

"What we're dealing with in Iraq is really a security situation that makes it difficult for religious practice to occur in a normal way," he said in answer to a reporter's question. He added that Iraq's constitution guarantees religious freedom but said that was hampered by sectarian violence and that worshippers were getting caught in the "crossfire" of broader attacks.

The report, however, painted a starker picture in Iraq.

"Many individuals from various religious groups were targeted because of their religious identity or their secular leanings," the report said.

It found that members of all religions in Iraq are "victims of harassment, intimidation, kidnapping, and killings" and that "frequent sectarian violence included attacks on places of worship."

Muslims who practice less-strict versions of their faith suffer because "conservative and extremist Islamic elements exert tremendous pressure on society to conform to their interpretations of Islam's precepts," the report said.

At the same time, it said, "non-Muslims (are) especially vulnerable to pressure and violence, because of their minority status and, often, because of the lack of a protective tribal structure."

Conditions worsened after the February 2006 bombing of a prized Shia mosque in the town of Samarra, the report said, and have continued to deteriorate over the past year.

"Terrorist attacks rendered many mosques, churches, and other holy sites unusable" and others closed under threat of attack, the report said.

It listed 38 separate attacks perpetrated against adherents of various religions, many of them Christians, between July 2006 and June 2007. "The magnitude of sectarian attacks on both Sunnis and Shia were also extremely high, albeit difficult to track," it said.

The report did not cover August 2007, when 520 people -- mainly members of the Yazidi community, a Kurdish-speaking religious minority -- were killed in quadruple suicide bombings blamed on al-Qaida in Iraq.

Outside of Iraq, the report also noted severe problems with religious freedom in a number of other Islamic or majority-Muslim nations, among them Afghanistan and Pakistan, both of which are U.S. allies in the war on terrorism.

-- Afghanistan: "Decades of war, years of Taliban rule, and weak democratic institutions, including a developing judiciary, have contributed to intolerance manifested in acts of harassment and violence against reform-minded Muslims and religious minorities."

-- Pakistan: Although the government has taken some steps to improve treatment of religious minorities, "discriminatory legislation and the Government's failure to take action against societal forces hostile to those who practice minority faiths fostered religious intolerance, acts of violence, and intimidation against followers of certain religious groups."

-- Saudi Arabia: In a country where faiths other than Islam are illegal, which usually comes in for harsh criticism on lack of religious freedom, the report noted some positive progress.

"While overall government policies continue to place severe restrictions on religious freedom, there were some improvements in specific areas during the period covered by this report," it said, noting nascent moves that "could lead to important improvements in the future."