Escalating violence across Iraq has forced the Chaldean Church to transfer the country's only theological university and a seminary from Baghdad to the Kurdish-controlled north, writes Michael Hirst.

Simon Peter, the Chaldean patriarchate's major seminary, and the Pontifical Babel College for Philosophy and Theology, will be relocated to Arbil, in the northern autonomous region of Kurdistan, AsiaNews reported last week.

Increasing bloodshed in Baghdad prompted the closure of both institutions last summer, and it was intended that each would be relocated to safer areas of the city. But the kidnapping of the seminary's rector and vice-rector in late 2006 - although both men were later released unharmed - prompted the decision to move to an area under Kurdish control. The autonomous region in Iraq's north was considered the only safe place for Iraqi Christians to live.

The United Nations estimates that 40 per cent of the one million Iraqis who have fled the country since 2003 are Christians, although they make up only 4 per cent of the country's pre-war population.

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