Keeping Christmas Alive on a Baghdad Street Corner

Perils Fail to Deter Lone Tree Vendor

Nouri Dawoud braves snipers and bombs to sell Christmas trees in Baghdad, where he worries less about death than dwindling sales. (Nancy Trejos -- The Washington Post)

BAGHDAD -- Nouri Dawoud has one of the most dangerous jobs in Baghdad. He sells Christmas trees.

For seven hours a day, he stands on the same street corner in a neighborhood where drive-by shootings and snipers are not uncommon. He caters to Christians, who are among the most targeted people in the city. On a good day, he attracts a crowd, a draw to any would-be suicide bomber.

Dawoud has been selling trees at the same corner in the Karrada district every Christmas season for 10 years. At 77, he is not ready to abandon his spot.

He may have no choice. Christmas was once a holiday that Christians and a few Muslims in Iraq enjoyed. Now, they fear celebrating it. These days in Baghdad, buying a Christmas tree can lead to getting killed. "People now, they have a lot of things to worry about other than trees," Dawoud said, his mouth full of pumpkin seeds, a popular snack here.

On Monday, one week before Christmas, Dawoud was the only tree vendor on his street, which in times past had become Christmas tree row in early December. His colleagues, he said, were too afraid to join him.

"They said, 'You go check it out first. You're an old man,' " he said.

With a black-checkered kaffiyeh wrapped around his head, he placed five tall, anemic-looking trees against a wall and waited for people to show up. Few did. With his one good eye, he scanned every car that drove by. He called his presence on the street a "fidai" -- a suicide mission -- and broke into a hearty laugh.

"Why should I be scared?" he said. "The old men, they don't care like the young people."

Dawoud is a Muslim, but he has lived among Christians in the mixed Karrada district for years. "We are brothers," he said, expressing a tolerance that is increasingly rare in Baghdad.

For centuries, including under the rule of Saddam Hussein, Iraq's Christian minority coexisted with Muslims. Hussein's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, was a Christian, one of an estimated 600,000 to 1 million people of the faith living in the country before the U.S.-led invasion overthrew Hussein in 2003.

Since that year, militant Islamic groups have waged a campaign against Christians, in part because some ran liquor stores and took jobs on American bases. But they appear to have been targeted mostly for not being Muslim.

In recent years, churches have been bombed and priests, ministers and worshipers have been kidnapped or killed. The violence picked up following Pope Benedict XVI's controversial citing this year of a 14th-century Byzantine emperor's description of Islam as "evil and inhuman."