The explosions echoed across Baghdad during Sunday evening services, showering congregations with shattered stained glass and hurling terrified worshippers to the floor. Yesterday was the first time that militants have mounted a co-ordinated wave of attacks on churchgoers as they worshipped.

“They’re trying to drive a wedge between the Muslims and Christians, but we are brothers and there will never be a civil war,” said Father Baskin Azzizian outside his bomb-scarred Syrian Catholic church.

The first blast hit an Armenian church in the central Karada district of Baghdad. Muhammad Ali Mansour, a 25-year-old guard protecting a neighbouring government building, said that the bomber, a heavily bearded Arab in a taxi, had begged him to be let through a street barricade.

“He pleaded repeatedly, saying, ‘I have something to do inside.’ But we know all the residents here and he was a stranger. He begged us three times but I sent him away and he went up another road,” he told The Times.

The car exploded next to an electrical generator and its fuel tanks, sending a huge cloud of black smoke over the residential neighbourhood.

About two dozen looters quickly descended on the Church of Our Lady of the Flowers, but the congregation, still terrified and cowering inside, turned them away “People were running around trying to find their children,” Mazen Sami Hartayoun, 43, said. But had the bomber detonated his charge ten minutes later as the people left the church, the scene could have been one of carnage.

“This is not an explosion to scare people,” Mr Hartayoun said. “If you want to frighten them you’d use a small bomb.”

Father Rafael Kutamai was giving the evening sermon at the nearby Syrian Church of Our Lady of the Survivor when he heard the blast close by, and sped up the ceremony. But as his 700-strong flock were taking Communion, the building was rocked by a second blast, just ten minutes later. He was wounded in the neck.

“Crazy, crazy. I can’t think who would do such a thing, but somebody who hates mankind — forget about whether they were Christian or Muslim,” Qahtan Adnan, a 25-year-old worshipper, said.

Iraqi ambulances, with armed security guards riding shotgun, arrived at the scene as nervous US soldiers shouted orders to check the rescue vehicles for more possible explosives.

The blast wrecked a nearby house. A blood-soaked rescuer said at least two men living opposite the church were killed. The attacks yesterday appeared to be an attempt to split Iraq’s complex religious web.

At the same time, Iraqi police and US militiary officials said that bombs had gone off outside a church in al-Dora, a restive area of southern Baghdad, and in the neighbourhood of New Baghdad in the southeast.

In Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city and home to a sizeable Christian community, four people were injured when a car bomb went off outside the Mark Bolus Church as the congregation were coming out of Mass.

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