Nael and Manar al-Najjar named their bakery outside San Diego after the town in Iraq where they married.CreditGabriel Ellison-Scowcroft for The New York Times

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By Brent Crane, Nov. 25, 2018

PRING VALLEY, Calif. — The marriage of Nael and Manar al-Najjar was forged in sugar.

Mr. Najjar grew up working in his family’s Baghdad sweet shop. When he proposed, three months after meeting his future wife at a family wedding, he traveled six hours to her hometown, carrying 15 boxes of confections: baklava, kenafeh and Turkish delights.

The couple settled in Baghdad, opened a bakery and started a family. As Catholics, though, they faced discrimination and threats of violence. When those threats turned deadly, they fled and sought asylum in America.

Since resettling, they have opened another bakery outside of San Diego. Running a sweet shop in Southern California requires a lot more than just baking skill, and the Najjars needed help. They got it from the International Rescue Committee, one of the eight organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.

“Now we have a big name,” Mrs. Najjar beamed.

The Najjars met and married in 2002, a year before the United States and its allies invaded Baghdad. In the following years, Iraq’s Christian minority faced increasing persecution. Numbering roughly a million in 2003, the population was cut in half by 2010, as many Christians emigrated to escape the violence against them.

Amid the turbulence of life in Iraq during this period, the family still found its routine, running the bakery, raising the children. “We lived, like, no problem,” Mrs. Najjar said.

Sharing her husband’s skill in the kitchen, Mrs. Najjar often cooked at our Lady of Salvation Church, Baghdad’s main Catholic cathedral. On Oct. 31, 2010, six militants from the Islamic State stormed the church during evening mass. They fired assault rifles, lobbed grenades and — when Iraqi commandos stormed the church — detonated explosives strapped to their chests.

Fifty-eight people died in the attack. Among the victims were two of Mr. Najjar’s relatives, one of them an infant.

two weeks later, Mrs. Najjar, who had not been at the church during the attack, found a note slipped under the front door of the family’s home. It said, “We’re going to kill you,” she recalled recently.

heir children were 4 and 2 years old at the time, and the Najjars decided they needed to pack up the family in a few suitcases and join the exodus of Iraqi Christians fleeing to northern Iraq, then to Turkey.

Once there, the Najjars initially settled in Usak, a provincial capital in eastern Turkey, where Mr. Najjar quickly found a job at a bakery. Soon after, they applied for asylum in America. It was granted in 2014, and the family moved to the San Diego area, where the parents worked in bakeries for three years and dreamed of again opening their own.

“We wanted to make something together, something strong,” said Mrs. Najjar, 38. “It is my dream and my husband’s dream.”

Mrs. Najjar working the front counter at her family’s sweet shop. Her husband does the baking in the back.CreditGabriel Ellison-Scowcroft for The New York Times

Running a sweet shop in Southern California requires a lot more than just baking skills, so the family sought help from the International Rescue Committee.CreditGabriel Ellison-Scowcroft for The New York Times

Mr. Najjar grew up working in his family’s Baghdad sweet shop.CreditGabriel Ellison-Scowcroft for The New York Times