Hundreds of Christian families from Baghdad are seeking refuge from a new al-Qaeda campaign against their community. The killing of 60 people in a church bombing in Baghdad last October and a subsequent wave of blasts near Christian homes in the city have triggered a "slow but steady exodus", according to the UN Refugee Agency. The plight of Iraq's Christians has raised alarm across the Middle East, where religious leaders fear the Christian minority is on its way to irrelevance in the lands where Christianity was born. That Christians now appear to be direct targets for al-Qaeda was reinforced by the New Year's eve attack on a church in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, which left 21 worshippers dead. The suspected suicide bombing came after the Islamic State of Iraq, the al-Qaeda-affiliated group which claimed responsibility for the Baghdad attacks, accused the Egyptian Coptic Church of detaining the wives of two priests who tried to convert to Islam. Youssef Sidhoum, editor of Watani, a Coptic weekly newspaper, says the violence would "definitely" lead more Christians to contemplate emigration. "The younger they are, the more they feel they have no opportunities here, and they feel insecure and prefer to leave the country," he says. Long before the blasts, religious leaders in the Middle East were struggling to stem the tide of migration of Christians, who made up about 20 per cent of the population at the turn of the 20th century, but are now estimated to be less than 10 per cent. But whether Christian migration has been faster than majority Muslim migration is difficult to gauge. Fiona McCallum, of the University of St Andrews in Scotland, says more Christians today might be leaving the region because of their religion, but generally they have gone in search of greater political stability and economic opportunity. But the impact of the changing political landscape cannot be ignored. Christians found an active voice in the secular ideology of Arab nationalism -- one of the founders of the Ba'ath movement in the 1940s was a Christian, as were many followers. But they have felt increasingly marginalised as political Islam became the dominant trend in the region, and authoritarian governments sought to placate Islamists with social concessions. Until the 1970s, Christians in Egypt, for example, were leaving to escape a stagnant socialist economy. More recently, they have also been frustrated by rising discrimination amid an increasingly assertive Islamist current in politics and society. Human rights groups, moreover, say violence against Copts has risen in the past two years, but the state fails to punish perpetrators, preferring instead to organise informal reconciliations. In Iraq, the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein suppressed the Shia majority but sought the approval of the Chaldean and Assyrian churches. A strong wave of Iraqi migration followed the 2003 war as the country edged closer to civil war and Christians suffered along with Shia Muslims from Sunni insurgent attacks. The number of Iraqi Christians has halved, according to some estimates, leaving them with a 3 per cent share of the population. Lebanon, the only country in the region where Christians were a slight majority a few decades ago, saw many leave during the civil war of 1975-1990. Although Christians (the majority are Maronites, a Catholic sect) still control the presidency and half of the parliamentary seats, their effective political influence has declined and they are now one of three large minorities. "We hope that this trend [of migration] will slow, but it's unthinkable that it will be reversed," says Father Samir Khalil Samir, an Egyptian-born professor at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome. "Take the example of Turkey. At the beginning of the 20th century the Christians were 20 per cent, now they are less than 0.2 per cent. "When the proportion [of Christians] is very low, it means the end," he says.

Additional reporting by Abigail Fiedling-Smith.