By OMAR SINAN, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Assailants triggered a coordinated series of explosions outside five churches in Baghdad and Mosul during Sunday evening services, killing 11 people and wounding more than 50 in the first major assault on Iraq (news - web sites)'s Christian minority since the 15-month-old insurgency began.

Separate violence beginning the night before killed 24, including an American soldier, and wounded 101. The toll included a suicide car bombing outside a Mosul police station that killed five people and wounded 53, and clashes in Fallujah between U.S. troops and insurgents that killed 12 Iraqis and wounded 39 others.

The unprecedented attacks against Iraq's 750,000-member Christian minority seemed to confirm community members' fears they might be targeted as suspected collaborators with American forces amid a rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism.
"What are the Muslims doing? Does this mean that they want us out?" Brother Louis, a deacon at Our Lady of Salvation, asked as he cried outside the damaged Assyrian Catholic church. "Those people who commit these awful criminal acts have nothing to do with God. They will go to hell."

Fire engines and ambulances raced to the scenes of the bombings as black smoke poured into the sky and U.S. attack helicopters circled overhead. The explosions came just minutes apart and hit four churches in Baghdad - two in Karada, one in the Dora neighborhood and one in New Baghdad. A fifth church was hit in Mosul, about 220 miles north of the capital. The attacks did not appear to be suicide bombings, U.S. military and Iraqi officials said.

The Vatican (news - web sites) called the attacks "terrible and worrisome," said spokesman Rev. Ciro Benedettini. Muslim clerics condemned the violence and offered condolences to the Christian community. "This is a cowardly act and targets all Iraqis," Abdul Hadi al-Daraji, spokesman for radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, told Al-Jazeera television. Mohammed Fadil al-Samara'i, an official with the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, blamed terrorist groups and others "who profit from creating civil disturbances in Iraq."

The attacks on the churches signaled a vast change in tactics for insurgents, who have focused many previous attacks on U.S. forces, Iraqi officials and police in a drive to push coalition forces from the country, weaken the interim government and hamper reconstruction efforts. To escape the chaos here, many of Iraq's Christians have gone to neighboring Jordan and Syria to wait for the security situation to improve.