From sub-Saharan Africa to China, Christians experience ‘high’ levels of persecution

Poster memorials and crosses for Christians who died in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Easter Sunday, 2019
• In Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday more than 250 people, 45 of them children, were killed in attacks on three churches and hotels; more than 500 people were injured. • Bombs killed 20 at a Catholic church in Jolo in the southern Philippines. • In China, state-sanctioned and ‘underground’ . . . Read More

Christians in Africa face ‘explosion’ in violence, senior church leader says

Church leaders as well as government officials and representatives of the Muslim community attended the funeral of the six killed in the Dablo attack. (Photo: World Watch Monitor)
Violence against Christians in Africa “is exploding”, according to a senior church leader in the Central African Republic. In Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Mozambique there has been an increase in attacks on Christians, including church leaders and churches in recent weeks, said Cardinal Dieudonne Nzapalainga in an interview with the . . . Read More

Al-Shabaab singles out 11 to kill in bus attack in northern Kenya; raises fear for Christians

Teachers working in north-eastern Kenya demonstrated in February 2015, asking to be reassigned following the killing of 20 of their colleagues in an attack by Islamist militants. (Photo: Getty Images)
Eleven people, almost all known to be Christians, were killed during an attack by the Islamist Al-Shabaab group on a bus in Kenya’s border region with Somalia on 6 December. The militants forced the bus, owned by Medina Bus Company (which transports people and goods between Kenya’s capital Nairobi and north-east . . . Read More

Afghanistan: Radical Islamist groups recruit at universities

The Taliban continues to launch deadly attacks, most recently on Wednesday in the capital Kabul where at least 15 people were killed in a suicide attack.(Photo: Getty Images)
While the Afghan government is engaged in peace talks with the hard-line Taliban movement, radical Islamist groups are spreading their ideology at universities. Basira Akhtar, a 22-year-old student, was beaten up twice earlier this year, at her university in the capital Kabul, when her headscarf slipped from her head. In . . . Read More

‘It’s time to be real: what happens in Iraq is ethnic cleansing’ – UK analyst

Tahira Church in Qaraqosh, a Christian town in northern Iraq, shortly after liberation from Islamic State in November 2016. (Photo: World Watch Monitor)
What Iraq’s Christians want from the West is to say the plain truth: that there is ethnic cleansing of Christians in the region and it is ongoing, Dr Tim Stanley told a meeting at the UK’s parliament last Tuesday, 9 July. The historian and columnist, working for UK daily newspaper . . . Read More

Burkina Faso: 5 leaders killed in 3 months as Islamists continue to target churches

Church leaders as well as government officials and representatives of the Muslim community attended the funeral of the six killed in the Dablo attack. (Photo: World Watch Monitor)
At least ten more Christians have been killed as a spate of attacks on churches continues in northern Burkina Faso. The ten, who died in two attacks on 12 and 13 May, include another Catholic priest, Siméon Yampa. On Monday, 13 May, a procession of four Catholics was attacked while . . . Read More

Sri Lankan Christians grapple with aftermath of Easter bombings amid fears of fresh attacks

Poster memorials and crosses for Christians who died in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Easter Sunday, 2019
Sri Lankan Arasaratnam Verl is deep in mourning. His son Jackson (13) and sister Verlini (36) were killed instantly when a bomb exploded in the evangelical Zion Church in the eastern city of Batticaloa on Easter Sunday morning, 21 April. Verlini’s husband Ranjith (39), an engineer and Blackbelt in karate, . . . Read More

Ten years after fake blasphemy charge, Pakistani Asia Bibi reunited with family

Asia Bibi is finally free, almost one decade after she was first imprisoned. (Photo: World Watch Monitor)
Asia Bibi’s daughter Eicham was 9 when she saw her mum badly beaten and in front of a mob charged with “blasphemy” against the Prophet Muhammad. For over 9 years, Eicham has visited her on death row in Pakistan. Finally, today, now a young woman at 18, Eicham and her . . . Read More

Burkina Faso church leader killed by Islamists: ‘I’d rather die than leave my community’

An outdoor church outside a home western Burkina Faso.(Photo: CIF Action via Flickr; CC 2.0)
Gunmen who attacked a Protestant church in Burkina Faso on 28 April asked the pastor and five others to convert to Islam before they killed them, World Watch Monitor has learned. Last Sunday’s violence in the West African country appears to have been the first attack, specifically on a church . . . Read More

“I was last to come out alive”- Kenyan student on her life-changing injuries from Garissa

Reachel Ginkonyo, in Kenya, in a wheelchair after surviving the Garissa massacre, April, 2015
Four years ago, on the eve of Good Friday – the day on which Christians remember Jesus Christ’s crucifixion – 143 Kenyan university students were killed, singled out by Al-Shabaab gunmen for their Christian faith. Four more died after armed forces arrived, making it the deadliest terrorist incident in Kenya . . . Read More