In the third week of February, the Alliance sent a pastoral team to Baghdad to underline the solidarity of the worldwide Reformed family with the people of Iraq.

Iraqi children "Our purpose was to affirm our fellowship with our Iraqi Christian brothers and sisters - and their Muslim neighbours," said Setri Nyomi, general secretary of the Alliance.

"For most people in Iraq the threat of war has further reduced the quality of life - already under severe pressure as the result of 12 years of punitive sanctions," Nyomi said.

The Gulf war and the earlier war with Iran continue to have a destructive impact on the country. "People of faith are raising many questions of where justice lies and calling for prayers for peace," the team reported.

In response, Margaretha Hendriks of the Protestant Church of Maluku shared a solidarity statement by Indonesian Christian and Muslim religious leaders with the Iraqi people, and Olivia Masih White of the United Church of Christ (USA) shared statements from US churches opposing war.

Christian and Muslim leaders told John Paarlberg of the Reformed Church in America, who lives in New York City, how their hearts went out to the people of his city following the September 11 terror attacks. Under the threat of a pitiless war, Iraqis are confronted with the same question, "Why must innocent people suffer?"

Setri Nyomi with Presbyterians in Baghdad.

Nyomi, who led the four-person visit, said that the intention was pastoral. "Our group sought to have contact with ordinary people, who will suffer most in an unacceptable war," Nyomi said. They wished to signal to the Iraqi people, Christian and Muslim alike, that Christians around the world are united with them in care and compassion.

A second purpose was to underline that the war that the US administration and its close allies seem determined to fight is not, for the world church, a battle between a "Christian west" and a "Muslim east".

"We do not subscribe to any interpretation of this conflict as Christian against Muslim," said Nyomi, who is also a president of the World Conference of Religions for Peace.

It was also important to encourage US and other churches in their opposition to the planned war.

There are five Presbyterian congregations in Iraq. In a visit to the Assyrian Presbyterian Church, a fifty-family congregation founded in 1921 by US missionaries, the team heard from the pastor's wife how her two-year-old daughter was shaking and trembling and jumping up and down as the bombs were exploding in 1991.

Through her tears the pastor's wife said, "I don't want that to happen again."

The team was taken to the El Ameria bomb shelter in Baghdad. In the 1991 Gulf War, roughly 300 Iraqi civilians, many of them children, were killed by two US "smart bombs" in a direct hit on the shelter. "Inside the shelter we could still see the outlines of bodies charred against concrete," John Paarlberg said. In Iraq, Washington's claim that the strike was an "honest mistake" is widely disbelieved.

Later that day, the team visited a leukaemia ward where mothers, and sometimes entire families, were staying with and caring for their children, some of whom were near death. Sanctions mean that the medicines needed to treat these children are hard to obtain. Four years ago, the UN children's fund reported that by 1998 half a million Iraqi children had died as a result of the Gulf War and the subsequent sanctions policy. Many more will have died since.

Leukaemia cases have increased sevenfold since 1991. This probably is a result of the depleted uranium used in US munitions during the Gulf War, although it may stem in part from chemical weapons destroyed in the conflict. We can't say for sure: the US blocked a World Health Organization study of the problem.

"This was," said Paarlberg, "the most sobering and emotionally difficult day of our visit."

Protestants in Iraq are a minority within a minority. 650,000 to 800,000 Iraqis - 3% of the population - are Christian. Most are Catholic (Latin, Armenian, Chaldean or Syrian rite) - almost 70% belong to the Chaldean Church of Babylon; 35,000 are Syrian or Armenian Orthodox.

While the rest of the world is marching to prevent a war, the team heard from Emmanuel Karim Delly, auxiliary archbishop of the Chaldean Catholic Patriarchate in Baghdad, that the Iraqi perspective is different.

"We have been at war for more than twelve years," Delly, who is also a vice-president of the Middle East Council of Churches, told them. "The sanctions are the continuation of the [Gulf] war," he said.

And the current invasion plans are just the continuation of this war by other means.

The team agreed that a new war offered no solution to the problems of the people in Iraq or elsewhere in the world and would not contribute to world peace.

"We felt the pain of the people of Iraq, and saw the devastation caused by the wars they have been through and the sanctions still in place," they said. "Everything points to the senselessness and callousness of war at this time."

The visit was facilitated by the Middle East Council of Churches offices in Cyprus, Jordan and Iraq.

"We are deeply grateful to the Middle East Council of Churches for all it did to coordinate our visit," Nyomi said.

"Even in the short time we were there, we could see the pivotal role it is playing in strengthening the ministry of the churches in this critical time in Iraq and the surrounding region. The good relationships it fosters with people of other faiths is also helpful as a public witness against the forces of war."

WARC/ENI/Team reports