In a bleak rocky outpost of north Iraq, Christian monk Bihman Samarchy chats about the year he spent recently in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's old city.
Dressed in the traditional black robes of the eastern Christian churches, he speaks softly in this lonely monastery perched on a mountainside between the city of Mosul and the Kurdish enclave in the far north of Iraq.
"I stayed there for a year and right now there are four Iraqis there out the six people at our monastery. For me it's just a service," said Samarchy, an Arab from a country with no relations with Israel and which glorifies Palestinians fighting Israeli occupation.
But Samarchy is as free to talk about the forbidden land as he is to go there, indications of the freedom this Christian sect says it has enjoyed in the modern Iraq run by the Baath party since 1963.
Iraq allows monks to serve time in the church's Mar Morqos monastery in East Jerusalem, on condition that no Israeli stamps are placed in their passports.
"We had nothing to do with politics," Samarchy said. "As Christians our way is love and that's what makes us able to go. You know that in the story of Noah's ark, the snake lived next to the dove. In our own church tradition, the snake coiled itself around the dove in order to protect it."
After his time in Israel, the church chose Samarchy, 32, as one of its four monks in residence at Mar Matta, the oldest monastery in Iraq, dating from the fourth century AD.
EARLY CHRISTIANITY IN IRAQ
Christianity has a long and distinguished history in Iraq, now a mainly Muslim country of 23 million. Tradition says one of Christ's apostles, Thomas, visited the ancient land, making it one of the first countries where the religion spread.
With the spread of Islam after the Arab conquest of the Middle East region in the seventh century, the number of monasteries eventually fell to today's four from the dozens noted by mediaeval Muslim chroniclers.
Today, the Baath regime has opened its doors to Iraq's Christians, and none of them is showing enthusiasm for a war which could even lead to the division of the country. The United States is threatening to invade because its says President Saddam Hussein is hiding weapons of mass destruction.
A federated or divided Iraq could give sway to mainly Muslim Kurds, who dominate in north Iraq where most of the country's Christians also live.
The Mosul district, where the various Christian denominations make up almost half of the population, was kept out of the Kurdish self-rule area set up after the 1991 Gulf war to end Iraq's occupation of Kuwait.
"We have a place in society -- not as a sect, but as citizens. We feel we are part of this one body. We have one shared (Iraqi) citizenship and the state has a responsibility to protect everyone," said Archbishop Saliba Isaac, leader of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Mosul.
Isaac said a significant number of Christians are members of the local Baath Party, founded by the Syrian Christian Michel Aflaq, who spent his final years in Baghdad.
BAATH PROTECTS CHRISTIANS
The Baath's secular Arab nationalist ideology has done much to keep religious extremism at bay in Iraq, though analysts say the decimation of the country's economy during 13 years of U.N. sanctions has led to heightened religious sentiment among Muslims.
Slogans such as "one Arab nation with an eternal message" and "yes to one nation" show a strong presence in Mosul and the mainly Christian villages in the surrounding countryside.
Samarchy said there are occasional problems with local Muslims and Kurds, who once pillaged furniture from the remote site, but not the authorities, who have carried out some renovations.
"Our relations with the state are good; there is freedom of worship. Our fear is from the people, not the government," he said, adding that Saddam has paid three official visits to the monastery.
Damage to Mosul during the 1991 war seems to have soured any taste among Christians for American "liberation" from three decades of one-party rule.
The church of Mar Yousef in a Mosul suburb was bombed on the first day of Operation Desert Storm, killing four people, said Janan Abbo, the wife of the church's current pastor.
"The shrapnel caused a gas container to ignite in a building next door and four then died in the fire," she said, standing in the simply-decorated church. "God knows why they hit us."
"Didn't they know it was a church? Of course they knew," a friend of Abbo's added angrily. "I hope there will be no war, because it would be a war for nothing."