Even delayed until daylight, Christmas in Iraq came without peace.
Fearing the lawlessness of Baghdad at night, thousands of Iraqi Christians postponed their traditional midnight services until dawn Thursday. But just before daybreak, the celebration was marred by a wave of rocket, mortar and grenade attacks on embassies, military bases, government ministries and a major hotel.
The rebel attacks struck a spiritual blow to Iraq's small Christian community, where the first Christmas since the fall of Saddam Hussein was already muted by fears of rising religious extremism and the mounting toll taken by crime and shortages of gas and electricity.
Representing just 3 percent of Iraq's 24 million people, Iraqi Christians see themselves in a growing struggle to carve out their place in a nation dramatically redrawing the bounds of religious and ethnic power.
"I can't deny we're afraid. We just pray that God will help us get to the end of this dark period," said Rev. John Ayub Suleiman, a Syriac Orthodox priest at Baghdad's Church of Sts. Peter and Paul.
Coming one day after deadly bombings in Baghdad and the northern city of Irbil killed 11 people, including 4 Americans, the renewed violence confirmed U.S. warnings that insurgents could unleash an offensive timed to the Christian holiday.
In Christian neighborhoods, shop windows were stuffed with Santa Claus figures and sprightly lights, while bakeries served sweet pastries to finely dressed customers. But celebrations were curtailed.
Fearing suicide attacks against targets perceived to be tied to the West, some church leaders in Baghdad canceled Sunday's services for the first time anyone could remember. Breaking a tradition of late-night Christmas parties, priests advised against gathering conspicuously, even in private homes.
Most dispiriting, Suleiman said, was taking the unprecedented step of arranging for some parishioners to discreetly carry guns on Christmas morning.
Seeking to pre-empt insurgent attacks, the U.S.-led coalition on Wednesday launched a second wave of raids and aerial strikes on suspected resistance strongholds that echoed overnight across the capital.
Then insurgent violence erupted about 6 a.m. Thursday when rocket-propelled grenades hit the Sheraton Hotel, home to many foreign contractors and journalists.
Rockets were also launched at the Iranian and Turkish embassies and a residential building beside the German Embassy, as well as the Interior Ministry and a Baghdad municipal office building. There were no casualties in any of the incidents.
A woman was wounded in a separate attack on a residential building near the Sheraton when a rocket tore into an apartment and through the walls of two bedrooms. Strikes were also reported in the Green Zone, which is occupied by coalition administrators.
After dark Thursday, a U.S. military camp in the town of Baquba, 40 miles north of Baghdad, was targeted in a mortar attack that wounded eight soldiers, U.S. officials said.
At churches across the capital, the attacks eclipsed hope that the day would bring solace after a bittersweet year.
Under Hussein's regime, Christians--mostly Assyrian Catholics, known as Chaldeans--enjoyed relative religious freedom and did not suffer the persecution that sent thousands of Iraq's majority Shiite Muslims to prisons and mass graves. But those who asserted their ethnic Assyrian identity faced often-brutal repression. Beginning in the late 19th Century, Chicago has been a major destination for Assyrians.
Iraqi Christians found reasons to rejoice in Hussein's downfall.
"Saddam suffocated us," said Yunan Goreal, 35, a Christian who spent six years in the Kurdish north working secretly for an Assyrian political party before returning to Baghdad in April. "We never dreamed of this. We never dreamed that we could come to Baghdad and live freely."
But they also speak of a growing anxiety. After the fall of Baghdad, a string of anti-Western attacks struck liquor stores owned by Christians. Threatening letters have arrived at churches and Assyrian political groups warning them to cover their heads as Muslims do, renounce alcohol and abandon their Western leanings.
Looking to the future, many Christians also say they are concerned that Islamic law will be enshrined, at their expense, in the new Iraqi constitution.
"We are not against Islam. All we demand is our legal rights as an original ethnic dimension of this land," said Romel Shamouel, editor of the newspaper of the Assyrian Patriotic Party. "We are afraid of being tyrannized by the majority in the eyes of the law."
"We are at a critical juncture," said Rev. Emanuel Youkhana, a priest returning to Iraq after 12 years in exile. "It is not enough for a constitution to say, `We respect the Christian liturgy.' We must fight--and I mean every responsible Iraqi--for the right to a secular state."
But political concerns faded amid talk of security at the Church of the Holy Heart in Baghdad's Karada neighborhood, where parents and children streamed from a bright blue-sky morning into a simple tan-brick sanctuary, stopping to cross themselves in holy water as they passed and filing into plain wooden pews.
"You can look at the faces of the people and see they are not like normal. They are scared," said Wiem Kienem, clutching the hands of her 10-year-old daughter, Marianna, and 6-year-old son, Ramez. "But it's other things . . . like we have no electricity. I couldn't even dry my hair this morning."
Children darted in and out of the door while their parents stood and recited the Lord's prayer in Arabic. Rev. Basil Marroki, in pearly white vestments, recited the names of members of the congregation who had died recently. Then he pointedly reminded the congregation that there would be no evening celebration, in contrast with past years.
Earlier, away from the congregation, Marroki said: "Of course we are celebrating, but they are frightened. Half of the families will not come this year, I think."
Not far away, at Golden Toys, a mother finished last-minute shopping; many Iraqis wait up to a week after Christmas to exchange gifts.
Anoosh Yegitian and her two children gazed through a glass case full of wristwatches in search of a gift. She and her family were planning to swap presents this year, but other traditions had been scuttled.
"We are just celebrating to convince the children that it's OK," Yegitian said, when her 9-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son were out of earshot.
"There are no parties or celebrations. We will not go to the church because it is not safe. We will buy gifts for the children and celebrate at home."