BAGHDAD – Christians in Mosul are fleeing their homes after a spate of killings left 12 dead this past week in one of the largest Christian communities in Iraq.

The killings follow large protests by the community last month against the passage of the nation's provincial elections law. An article that would have given representation to Christians and other minorities was removed from the law before its passage.

Now the last haven for Christians is gone, said Canon Andrew White, the vicar of St. George's church in Baghdad.

After a spree of killings and forced evictions of Iraqi Christians in Baghdad last year, many fled to Mosul. But even there they could not escape the danger. In February of this year, the Archbishop Paulos Faraj Raho of Mosul was kidnapped and killed.

"Christians are being killed in the only place they felt safe, in Nineveh," White said, referring to the province of which Mosul is the capital. "This is where they fled to and now there's no safe place for them."

More than a thousand Christian families have fled Mosul for outlying villages and villages in the Kurdistan region in search of safety, a spokesman for the Ministry of Endowment and Religious Affairs said. Posters are being put up with guidelines on how to leave.

"The Christian families left in Mosul are very few indeed," said Mariwan Nakshabandee, spokesman for the ministry that oversees Christian communities in Mosul.

Iraqi Assyrian and Chaldean Catholics trace their roots to ancient Mesopotamia, and Christian communities were prominent in many major Iraqi cities, including Mosul in the north and Basra in the south as well as Baghdad. The capital had enclaves in the central neighborhood of Karada, the eastern neighborhood of New Baghdad and nearby al-Ghadir as well as Dora in the capital's south.

Christians once were estimated to comprise about 3 percent of the Iraqi population, or about 800,000 people.

But as Iraq grew violent after the U.S. invasion in 2003, the Christian community dwindled. Now some estimate that more than half of Iraq's Christians have fled. White believes that the Christian community is about a quarter of the earlier 800,000.

"It isn't easy for these people to leave," he said. "They have no representation."

On Saturday, three more Christian men were found dead in Mosul. Among the 12 killed this past week were doctors, engineers, pharmacists and at least one disabled man. Three empty homes of Christian families in eastern Mosul who had fled were reduced to rubble as a warning, police in Mosul said.

Some of the assassins told those they killed that "you want an autonomous region," said Shlemon Wirduni, auxiliary bishop of the Chaldean Patriarch in Baghdad, who was getting updates every few hours from churches in Mosul. The assassins were referring, he said, to the aspirations of some Assyrian and Chaldean Christians to create an autonomous Christian region in the northern plains of Nineveh province.

Wirduni lamented that despite outcries to the international press, United Nations officials and Iraqi government officials, nothing was being done.

In Nineveh province, governor Duraid Kashmoula said the increase in attacks on Christians was due to the failure of a recent security operation in Mosul. He blamed al-Qaida in Iraq, an extremist Sunni group, for the recent string of killings.

Southeast of Baghdad, in Amarah, a U.S. soldier was killed Saturday when a bomb exploded near his vehicle. The U.S. military said it was withholding soldier's name until it notified next of kin.

Leila Fadel is the Baghdad bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers. The Associated Press contributed to this report.