Iraqi Christians are more afraid of hijackers and looters than radical Muslims. A journalist and author reports from the parish of St Elya's

I arrived at the Babel Pontifical College, a two-storey, honey-coloured square building in south-east Baghdad, just at the moment when American soldiers were towing away an intact Iraqi army rocket launcher positioned alongside the college walls in preparation for the US-led invasion. Children flocked excitedly around the Americans as if they were film stars and became even more excited when the fresh-faced soldier in the cab of the second breakdown truck, despite all his fiddling with the ignition key, was unable to start the engine.

Founded in 1991, and affiliated to the Pontifical Urban University in Rome, Babel College in Al Daura offers Catholic, Assyrian and Orthodox students the chance to study theology and philosophy together. What is more, four of its teaching staff are Muslims. But the Iraqi army's decision to position rocket launchers, a radar and other military vehicles (now stripped of their tyres, dashboards and engines) next to the college resulted in, among other things, the generator being broken when it was hit by a shell and damage to the air-conditioning system. Without a new generator and repairs to the air-conditioning the college will be unable to open in time for the new academic year, when it is expected that there will be an upsurge in numbers of lay students.

When two American military police Bradleys turn up to assist the breakdown truck, Fr Sami Danka, a member of the college board and the rector of St Peter's Seminary across the road, takes the opportunity to voice his concerns about the threat of looters to the college. Despite the presence of armed guards, thieves have already managed to get away with two tons of steel from the new multi-purpose hall currently under construction. Squirming from the punishing heat of the midday sun, an amiable officer listens sympathetically to Fr Danka and says that he will mention the college in his report so that patrols can keep an eye on it.

Without a government and a proper police force in the city, both Christians and Muslims live in daily fear of attacks on their property or members of their family. You hear stories of kidnappings, shootings and carjackings. This is no liberation, many people complain angrily. One Chaldean bishop put it this way. This is not Ali Baba and the forty thieves. This is Ali Baba and the 40,000 thieves. Forty thousand is the number of prisoners that Saddam was said to have pardoned last November.

I had decided to visit Baghdad to see how Christians were faring in the birth of a new Iraq. I had only been to Baghdad once before, in 1998, to attend a Christian conference to highlight the suffering and hardship caused by the sanctions imposed in 1991. Then, under Saddam's regime, they were frightened to speak out, but felt safe to walk the streets. Now, under American occupation, they are free to speak out, but frightened to walk the streets - especially after dark.

There are around one million Christians in Iraq, most of them Catholics - either Chaldean (the vast majority), Syrian, Armenian or Latin. The sprawling, flat, dusty city of Baghdad is home to an estimated 500,000 Christians and more than 50 churches. St Elya's Chaldean church, where I stayed, is in New Baghdad, a shabby area in the south-east of the city made up of poor and lower-middle-class families living in traditional grey low-rise houses or flats. Like much of Baghdad, the streets are pot-holed and the pavements broken and strewn with foul-smelling mounds of rubbish, which are frequently set alight by children. The focal point of New Baghdad is a busy, wide road lined with small shops. At one end is a bustling market, where you can buy everything from cheap clothes and chickens to looted office furniture and Kalashnikovs and AK-47s. At the other end is the Daura Expressway which takes traffic further south across the Tigris.

The photograph of Saddam Hussein with His Excellency Chaldean Patriarch Raphael I Bidawid has now been taken down from the small parish office of St Elya's, where from morning to evening people pop in and out to discuss their problems or exchange the latest gossip. The parish has 3,270 families, with an average of five to six people per family, and around 1,800 people attend the three Sunday Masses. Last year Fr Basha Warda, St Elya's young, energetic Redemptorist priest, and his assistant - a 72-year-old married priest who is father to 10 children (one of them training for the priesthood) - conducted 270 baptisms, 70 weddings and 37 funerals.

St Elya's stands next to a Shia mosque, whose minaret soars high above the simple cross on top of the squat, white church. This is a country where religious and family bonds are tight, and where Christians and Muslims are still expected to marry within their own communities. But despite fears of a Muslim state, I saw no tensions on the ground between the two communities. During the bombing of Baghdad, both Christian and Muslim families took shelter in the basement of the church. Fr Basha supplied the mosque with its generator, and I saw how, throughout the day, Muslims wander into the yard of the church to fill up plastic containers with clean water from the two tanks beside the grotto to Our Lady.

In common with other Christians I spoke to, Fr Basha does not believe that Christians face any danger from a militant Islamic regime. The Americans may not have brought security and stability to Baghdad, his reasoning goes, but they will not allow Shia extremists to seize control.

After so many years of having one voice and one party, it will be a challenge to live with diversity, Fr Basha told me. There is a possibility of exchanging ideas if we accept each other. As Christians, we should be tolerant and our Christian culture should remind us that we are peacemakers. This is not a principle to be declared but a reality to be lived.

But there was less optimism at the headquarters of the Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM) where I was taken by Bishop Jaques Isaacs, the portly, chatty rector of Babel College. The ADM is one of more than 20 political parties that have established themselves in bombed-out or looted government buildings across Baghdad; the party lays claim to a large complex in Zaouna in the east of the city, which before the war was home to the Feyadeen, the Saddam loyalists. In its grounds - beside a huge crater left by a bomb from a B52 - is a former prison known as the red rooms. It was here, I was told, that Uday Hussein supervised the torture of countless people. At the entrance, several men sat at a table, while a youth wearing combat fatigues and brandishing a Kalashnikov paced around.

The ADM's general secretary, Yonadam Kanna, is a smartly dressed, articulate man with a neat silver moustache. He tells me that the ADM was established in 1979 and that it has 10,000 members. It is, he adds, a Christian, not a Church, organisation and that the Christians represent the original people of Iraq. There are four cultures in Iraq, he says boldly. The first is Assyrian-Chaldean, the second is Islam, the third the Arabs and the fourth the Kurds and the Turkomens. These four nations in Iraq must be equal and sharers in power.

Kanna, who was involved in political and armed struggle in northern Iraq and fled to the mountains after Saddam sentenced him to death in 1984, fears that Islamic extremists will begin to target Christians. The alleged destruction and looting the previous day by Muslims of six Christian-owned factories involved in alcohol production could well be a sign of things to come, he suggested.

Malik Kadifa shares Kanna's concerns. A 32-year-old Syrian Orthodox architect and university lecturer who lives near Baghdad Airport, he said he was frightened of an Islamic government appearing similar to that of Iran, where the Christians are prevented from wearing crosses and have to study the Koran. The Shia are very strong. Many people I know share this fear, he says, adding that some Shia and Wahhabi Muslims at his university have referred to him contemptuously as a crusader.

But Iraq's political future still seems abstract next to the lack of any kind of visible civic authority in Baghdad, a preoccupation shared by Muslims and Christians alike. The Americans are holed up in Saddam's former palaces and blackened government buildings, protected by razor wire and Abraham tanks; outside are the daily power cuts, problems with water, sanitation, telephone lines and rubbish. Hospitals are short of medicines and basic equipment. Schools are only open for a few hours a day, if at all, and many shops and businesses remain closed because of bomb damage or safety fears. Families are having to draw on savings to survive.

But even after two weeks in Baghdad, I noted small signs of normality making their appearance in the city: the occasional dustcart on the streets, the return of the red and white double-decker buses along the broad boulevards of the city centre, a fire engine hosing down the dirty windows of a hotel. A new Iraqi TV station was even taking to the air for a few hours a day. But sitting on the balcony of the parish house of St Elya after dusk, I would hear the sound of gunfire ringing out across the darkened city above the throb of the generator. The shots came sometimes in quick bursts, sometimes in what sounded like fierce exchanges and, at other times, heavy thuds.

What kind of Iraq will emerge, what kind of government will run it and what the effect will be on Christians, is uncertain. The psychological shift after 24 years of a brutal dictatorship is incalculable. There is fear for the future, but there is also hope. Fr Basha talks with passion about the Church providing education, which it had done until Christian schools were nationalised in 1974; for his part, he is planning to develop a primary school for Christians and Muslims in the parish centre.

Elsewhere, Mohir Towfiq, who studied town planning at University College London and helps to run the Centre for Discipleship and Counselling, based at St Beham's Syrian Catholic church in El Gadeer, argues that what Christians in Iraq urgently need is spiritual renewal and a deeper biblical formation. He talks loosely of the base communities in Latin America. If the Church has a role it will be through lay people, not the leaders, he suggests.

One thing is certain: the world beyond Iraq's borders is arriving. The shops and market stalls are doing a brisk trade in satellite TV dishes. Of the many choices which lie ahead, for many young Iraqi Christians the removal of Saddam's regime now offers the possibility of a new life: not just in their homeland but in the promised lands of Europe or America.