Attacks continue across Iraq, Christian community flees violence -...

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A car bomb tore through a busy commercial street in Baghdad's eastern Habibiya neighborhood on Friday, killing six people and wounding 16 more, police officials said.

Health officials confirmed the figures.

The United Nations says 1,737 people, mostly civilians, were killed in Iraq in July, marking a dramatic decline from the previous month, when some 2,400 people were killed as Sunni militants swept across large parts of the country, capturing the second largest city Mosul.

Mosul lies across the Tigris River from the ancient city of Nineveh, at the heart of Mesopotamia.

It thrived at a time when what is now Iraq was considered a "cradle of civilization", and home for the majority of Christians in Iraq.

For centuries its population showed the importance of Iraq as a crossroad of trade and culture.

For the first time in 2,000 years, Mosul is devoid of Christians.

The ancient Christian community of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul had all fled, ending a presence stretching back nearly two millennia after radical Islamists set them a midday deadline to submit to Islamic rule or leave.

The ultimatum by the Islamic State drove out the few hundred Christians who had stayed on when the group's hardline Sunni Muslim fighters overran Mosul a month ago, threatening Christians and the diverse city's other religious communities.

The Islamic State gave any remaining Christians a final choice to make: Convert to Islam, pay a religious tax, or face the sword. The Christians described their flight as a historic loss.

The Islamic State, an al Qaeda offshoot, relayed its ultimatum from mosque loudspeakers and spray-painted Christian properties with the letter "N" for Nasrani, or Christian, residents said. Religious leaders have expressed alarm at the order.

"It is forbidden for Christians to be rejected, expelled or wiped out," said Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako in a statement published on his official website.

Mosul, the largest city in northern Iraq, was once among the country's most mixed.

Waves of attacks on Christians since the 2003 US-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein eroded its once sizeable Christian population, mainly from the Assyrian and Chaldean denominations.

The worst blow in recent memory came when the Islamic State fighters and their allies swept into the city last month.

Christians in other parts of Iraq worried that the campaign to clear Christians from Mosul will extend throughout Nineveh province, a vast area that stretches to the Syrian border.

REUTERS