Iraq crisis: The last Christians of Dora
Dora's is not a precipitate flight, as so many others of Christians and other minorities in Iraq have been in 2014: a year of ethnic cleansing that capped a decade of violence and disasters. It is more deliberate, but more permanent.
"I think all our families are thinking of emigrating now," Fr Timothaeus said. "They are marking time. They think of their lives here as temporary."
Dora is a suburb of Baghdad, a city which has ironically become safer as the rest of Iraq has burned in 2014.
But it is a Sunni suburb, and in Iraq's fractured sectarian politics that means it is awash with jihadis of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and their sympathisers.
Father Timothaeus Issa of the St Shmoni Church in Dora, Baghdad (Will Wintercross/The Telegraph)
The constant death threats have built on years of bombings and kidnaps to create a psychological turning point for what was once a thriving mixed community.
A decade ago, when the Americans and British invaded Iraq, there were 150,000 Christians mostly Assyrian and Chaldean Catholics living in Dora. With its broad if dusty streets, and comfortable villas, it must have been a decent place to live.
Now, the blast walls that snake through Baghdad turn Dora like most of the city's suburbs into a Russian doll of communities: Christians are surrounded by Sunnis, themselves walled off from Baghdad's surrounding Shia majority.
Just 1,500 Christians remain.
They worship at the emptying churches like Fr Timothaeus's St Shmoni's, behind barricades and army checkpoints. Every month, he says, two or three more families load their cars and quit.
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Iraq crisis: The last Christians of Dora