WASHINGTON – Representatives of Iraq’s minority Assyrian Christian community are charging that their numbers in the country are sharply and rapidly dwindling as many flee to border states to escape persecution.

In a pointed statement released yesterday, the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition on Persecution of Christian Iraqis, William Murray, said that between 60,000 and 80,000 Chaldo-Assyrian Christians have fled Iraq since the fall of Baghdad in 2003.

“Christian women are harassed, have acid thrown into their faces, are kidnapped and raped,” Mr. Murray wrote. “They seek some safety behind the Muslim hajib. Many Islamists incorrectly accuse Iraqi Christians of being agents of the American military or other elements of the so-called Christian West.” The statement went on to accuse Muslim terrorists of kidnapping Christian children and bombing churches and Christian businesses.

The Aramaic-speaking Chaldo-Assyrians claim to be one of the world’s first Christian communities, dating back to the time of the Apostles. The State Department’s only figures on the group’s recent exodus from Iraq were made public in January. The department’s annual human rights report charged that at least 30,000 had fled to Syria from Iraq since March 2004. Chaldo-Assyrian representatives say that 1 million remain in Iraq.

“We think the number of Chaldo-Assyrians who have fled Iraq is closer to 80,000,” the project director of the Iraq Sustainable Democracy Project, Michael Youash, said yesterday. “Our networks within Syria and Jordan and Turkey are feeding back their estimates based on their work to relieve the hardships of these people in the absence of the international community’s assistance to them.”

Mr. Youash’s group is a Chaldo-Assyrian organization that monitors the status of minorities in post-Saddam Iraq.