WASHINGTON, DC — North Korea stands at the top of a list of 50 countries where at least 215 million Christians faced the most severe persecution in 2017, resulting in 3,066 deaths and 1,020 rapes mainly targeting women, revealed Open Doors, an organization that monitors ill-treated Christians worldwide.
At the National Press Club on Wednesday, David Curry, the president and CEO of Open Doors, unveiled the 2018 World Wide List (WWL) of the top 50 “most dangerous” countries to worship Jesus. Referring to North Korea, he declared:
Imagine in your mind a leader that thinks he’s god but acts like an animal — devouring his own people with his teeth where people are forced to worship at the statute of Kim Jung Un and bow down and lay flowers at his feet as if he was a god.
Yet, [Kim] sets up controls mechanisms, neighborhood watches that surround communities rewarding citizens for spying on each other giving them more food if they find somebody who has a Bible and who purports to a be a Christian and that makes Christians the number one enemy of the state in North Korea and that’s why it is the number one on the world’s watchlist.
Open Doors pointed out that thousands of Christians are facing death worldwide for practicing their faith, particularly in North Korea.
According to the monitor group’s 2018 World Watch List (WWL), “215 million Christians experience high levels of persecution in the [50] countries on the World Watch List,” with the majority of them in North Korea, considered “the worst place for Christians” for 16 consecutive years since 2002.
Open Doors reported:
The primary driver of persecution in North Korea is the state. For three generations, everything in the country focused on idolizing the leading [Kim Jung Un] family. Christians are seen as hostile elements in society that have to be eradicated.
Due to the constant indoctrination permeating the whole country, neighbors and even family members are highly watchful and report any suspicious religious activity to the authorities…The situation for Christians is vulnerable and precarious. They face persecution from state authorities and their non-Christian family, friends and neighbors. Pray for their protection.
There are many Christians languishing, starving, and enduring hard labor in North Korea prisons for merely owning a Bible and having faith in Jesus Christ.
Since the U.S.-led war that started in Afghanistan soon after September 11, 2001, the United States has spent at least $877 billion on the war-devastated country, including on the promotion of religious freedoms.
Nevertheless, Afghanistan came in second place in the list of the top 50 worst countries in terms of persecution — where the cost of being a Christian can quickly turn into a nightmare and the last breath one ever takes.
During the 2017 reporting period covered by the latest World Watch List, persecutors killed 3,066 Christians, kidnapped 1,252, raped 1,020, and attacked 793 churches, noted Open Doors.
Of the top ten countries, eight are tormented by “Islamic Oppression,” which mainly refers to hostility against Christians. Eritrea and North Korea are the exceptions.
Meanwhile, persecution against Christians at the hands of “Hindu extremists” in India is on the rise, resulting in deaths and rape of Christian women.
“A shocking trend in the world watchlist I want to highlight for you today is the increase in persecution of Christian women,” stated Curry. “The data seems to prove that Christian women are the most vulnerable population today with sexual harassment and rape and forced marriage being prime tactics from extremists against the world against Christians.”
Pakistan, India’s regional enemy, has accused Hindu extremists of persecuting Christians and Muslims and forcing them to convert to their religion.
Hindu nationalist groups are reportedly affiliated with Indian President Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Pro-Hindu nationalism “President Modi only wants one religion,” proclaimed Curry.
Every day, Christian women reportedly face sexual harassment, rape, and forced marriage, all common in India, which is ranked 11 on the persecution list.
The justice for Christians in India is “poor,” determined Curry, noting that 635 Jesus followers were held and detained in the nation without trial last year alone, often called one of the largest democracies in the world.
Of the 50 nations on the Open Doors World Watch list, at least two Western Hemisphere countries made the cut joining the very few predominantly Christian nations on the list — Latin America’s Mexico (39th place) and Colombia (49th) where persecution is reportedly driven by “organized crime and corruption.”
The monitor group identifies North Korea’s communist and post-communist oppression as the primary source of persecution against Christians, which make up a little over 1 percent (300,000) of the 25.4 million population.
The assessment deems more than 60 percent of the persecution tactics employed by Kim as violent.
Noreen Lagahri, she is a Muslim and two weeks ago she was arrested for planning to bomb a Church in Pakistan. She confessed that she planned to do suicide attack on the Church and she was working for Al Qaeda and Taliban. But now she has been released from prison by the Pakistani government because they say that her life will be ruined if she stays in jail so she will now continue her studies.
This woman is a Christian and Pakistan and the Islamic Terrorist want her killed.
Asia Bibi (Asiya Noreen Bibi), a Christian sister who was arrested on false charges of blasphemy. She has been in jail for 9 years and is facing death penalty for a crime she didn’t even commit just because she is a Christian. The western world still do not understand that Christians in Pakistan are facing worst kind of persecution and genocide.
WARRI, Nigeria — The so-called Islamic State has different strategies in different parts of the world, but in Africa and in Europe, certainly, its core objective is becoming clear: to kill Christians. Its long-term goal: to provoke a new Crusade, reviving the holy wars of many hundreds of years ago in the belief that this time around Islam will win.
In practical terms, this focus on a single pervasive, easily targeted enemy is useful to a “caliphate” under pressure that is trying to keep its troops in line.
Earlier this month, a man named Abu Musab al-Barnawi announced that he had taken over the infamous Boko Haram organization. And his first message as Boko Haram’s leader was as clear as it was concise—on his watch, the group’s main focus will be killing Christians.
According to an interview published this month by the self-proclaimed Islamic State group (ISIS), al-Barnawi threatened to bomb churches and kill Christians, but will no longer attack places used by Muslims.
The man described as the new wali, or governor, of ISIS West Africa Province (as Boko Haram wants to be known), said there is a plot by the Western nations to Christianize the region and also claimed that charity organizations are being used to achieve this, according to an interview published in the Islamic State newspaper al-Nabaa and translated by SITE Intelligence Group.
“They strongly seek to Christianize the society,” he said of these charities. “They exploit the condition of those who are displaced under the raging war, providing them with food and shelter and then Christianizing their children.”
The man who now runs Boko Haram said the group will deal with Christians by “booby-trapping and blowing up every church that we are able to reach, and killing all of those who we find from the citizens of the cross.”
Not only were al-Barnawi’s intentions clear, his agenda for Boko Haram also appears to be a clear script written by ISIS, to whom he answers. The new leader will be expected to deliver results that his predecessor, Abubakar Shekau, failed to achieve.
When Boko Haram under Shekau’s leadership pledged allegiance to ISIS last year, it looked like the group would adopt ISIS modus operandi and embrace its ultimate goal to lead Muslims toward an apocalyptic battle against “infidels,” and eventually create a unified, Muslim territory where it would enforce its extremist beliefs. But that didn’t turn out to be the case.
While ISIS, with a precise goal of gaining and inspiring its followers, developed strategies of achieving its aim, including citing the Quran in shaping its vision, and referencing the words of the Prophet in its statements, most of which it released on its well packaged online magazine, Dabiq, Boko Haram on the other hand showed it was a loosely organized group with militants lacking in strategy and erratic in behavior as it began to focus its attacks on the same Muslims it needed to inspire and recruit.
In recent months, rumors began to fly that Shekau had run into problems with the leadership of ISIS for his failure to obey its guidance.
In June, U.S. Marine Lt. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, the nominee to lead the U.S. military’s Africa Command, told a congressional hearing that Boko Haram have fractured internally, with a big group splitting away from Shekau over his failure to heed to instructions from ISIS, including ignoring calls to stop using children as suicide bombers.
“What concerns me is the breakoff group of Boko Haram who wants to be more ISIL-like,” said Waldhauser, “and consequently buy into the ISIL-brand of attacking Western interests.”
Boko Haram has lost ground to a more determined Nigerian military in recent months, and without territory it loses some of its draw for new recruits, but al-Barnawi’s anti-Christian focus is tried and tested by his mentors in the “caliphate,” who want to keep the Nigerian conflict turned up to a full boil.
Al-Barnawi’s anti-Christian rhetoric is already the focus of ISIS in Europe. On the day he was announced as Boko Haram’s new leader, ISIS used the latest issue of Dabiq to paint Christianity as a “false” religion and Christians as “cross worshippers.” It encouraged Muslims to attack churches in a ways similar to the atrocity in France last month, where two men entered a Catholic church in small town Normandy, slit the throat of an 86-year-old priest, and gravely wounded a nun.
ISIS has proven in the past that it is capable of following up on its warnings, and determined to do so, is why the threats by the leader of its so-called West Africa province must be taken seriously.
The group’s planned attack on a church in Villejuif in the Paris area in April 2015 was thwarted by French police after the man who was supposed to carry out the operation accidentally shot himself in the leg. But after failing in Villejuif, it returned to carry out the murder in Normandy, showing it can hit where it said it’s going to hit—at a church. It isthreatening to do the same in cities like London and Washington, D.C., and now in West Africa. With the Normandy attack, it was trying to prove to the world that it can do what it says it will do.
The Christians of the Middle East, though a minority, and a dwindling one in many places, are targeted as well. In June, an Egyptian affiliate of the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the murder of a priest in the Sinai Peninsula where it operates, describing him as a “disbelieving combatant,” in a way ISIS often describes non-Muslims.
ISIS has set an ambitious goal of fighting until “disbelievers” accept its options of conversion, submission by paying the infidel tax (jizyah), or death, and its removal of Shekau as Boko Haram leader is a clear indication that it wants its jihad to expand until “it covers all eastern and western extents of the Earth,” as it puts it in the fifth issue ofDabiq. In its home base straddling parts of Iraq and Syria, ISIS has persecuted all supposed infidels, including Yazidis—condemned as pagans and murdered or sold into slavery—as well as Christians.
This new global emphasis on “cross worshippers” is a return to the group’s jihadist roots, harking back to the 1998 declaration by Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and others that they would wage war on “Crusaders and Jews” around the world. A return to fundamentals is often the strategy of an organization trying to regain focus and rationalize its structure.
“It wouldn’t be easy for al-Barnawi to operate in the state at which Boko Haram is at the moment,” said Ushie Michael, a prominent Nigerian security analyst who has been following the activities of the group right from inception. “Shekau still has his faction, and there is most likely going to be a clash between both groups.”
As ISIS seeks to reposition Boko Haram, Shekau disagrees with the new arrangement, and as a recording purportedly from him suggests, the former leader—who described al-Barnawi as “an infidel” preaching “false creeds”—sees the announcement of a new head of the sect as a coup.
“At the beginning of these exchanges [with ISIS], I was deceived. I was made to articulate my beliefs in writing, but this was rejected,” Shekau said.
As things stand, Shekau has lost control of what remains of Boko Haram, and whether or not he agrees with this new development, it doesn’t change what ISIS intends to do. To achieve its ultimate ambition of securing a global caliphate through a global war, it must keep its recruits—whether in the field in the Middle East, or fighting as part of subsidiaries in Africa, or as “lone wolves” in Europe—focused on the enemy that’s at hand: Christians.
