Crime
Four Christians killed by jihadis in Burkina Faso for wearing crucifixes
A series of deadly militant attacks targeting Christians in the northeast part of Burkina Faso, a once peaceful West African country, has rocked the Christian community.
Earlier this month, the president of the Episcopal Conference of Burkina Faso and Niger, Bishop Laurent Dabiré, told Aid to the Church in Need that Christians are in danger of “elimination” from the country due to the ongoing attacks against their community by Islamic extremists.
His warning comes as Islamic extremist violence across the Sahel region of West Africa has been rising since 2016.
Dabiré detailed a June 27 attack that occurred in the northern Diocese of Ouahigouya, which, according to the papal charity, was the fifth attack against Christians in northeast Burkina Faso since the beginning of 2019.
The June 27 attack happened in the village of Bani during a time when the village’s residents were gathered together.
“The Islamists arrived and forced everybody to lie face down on the ground,” the bishop said. “Then they searched them. Four people were wearing crucifixes. So they killed them because they were Christians.”
Dabiré said that after murdering the Christians who were wearing crucifixes, the extremists told other villagers that they would also be killed if they did not convert to Islam.
According to Aid to the Church in Need, at least 20 Christians have been killed in the five attacks carried out this year targeting Christian communities. Other attacks have occurred in the Dioceses of Dori and Kaya.
In addition to attacks in Burkina Faso, the extremist groups have also carried out massacres in countries like Mali and Niger as over 4 million people have been forced to flee from their homes in recent years.
“At first, they were only active in the frontier region between Mali and Niger,” Dabiré said. “But slowly they have moved into the interior of the country, attacking the army, civil structures, and the people. Today their main target appears to be the Christians and I believe they are trying to trigger an interreligious conflict.”
In April, gunmen killed five Catholic worshipers and their priest while leaving a church service in Silgadji.
In May, four Catholics were killed while transporting a statue of the Virgin Mary during a Marian procession.
In Burkina Faso, Muslims comprise over 60 percent of the population. The Christian population makes up over 20 percent of the population, most of which are Catholics.
Earlier in June, about a dozen gunmen killed at least 19 people in the northern Burkina town of Airbinda.
Dabiré warned that youths from the region have also joined the extremist factions.
“They include youths who have joined the jihadists because they have no money, no work and no prospects, but there are also radicalized elements who are involved in these movements which they see as the expression of their Islamic faith,” he said.
As many as 70,000 people fled their homes in a span of two months earlier this year as a result of armed groups burning down schools and killing innocent civilians.
And over 100,000 people have been displaced in Burkina Faso, the U.N. adds, with more than half of them being displaced since the beginning of 2019.
According to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Washington-based think tank, there were 137 violent events with 149 fatalities attributed to Islamic extremist attacks in 2018.
Through the midpoint of 2019, the organization reports that there were 191 episodes of violence and 324 fatalities. Those attacks have been primarily carried out by three different groups: the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, the Macina Liberation Front, and Ansaroul Islam.
“Ansaroul Islam has played an outsized role in the destabilization of northern Burkina Faso,” a July report from the think tank reads. “From 2016 to 2018, just over half of militant Islamist violent events in Burkina Faso were attributed to Ansaroul Islam. These attacks were concentrated in the northern province of Soum and clustered around the provincial capital, Djibo.”
The report states that Ansaroul Islam has carried out a higher percentage of attacks against civilians than any other militant group in the region. In addition to the 100,000 people who’ve fled their homes, the think-tank notes that the violence has forced 352 schools to close in the Soum province.
However, Ansaroul Islam was only associated with 16 violent attacks and seven deaths by mid-2019, suggesting that the group has played a diminished role in the escalation of violence this year.
“It is also speculated that a number of militants may have split from Ansaroul Islam, joining FLM or ISGS following leader Ibrahim Malam Dicko death in May 2017,” think tank report reads. “Both militant Islamist groups are well known in the region and readily employ social media as well as communication tools.”
Many of the victims of the escalation in extremist violence in Burkina Faso have been Muslims. But attacks targetting Christians represent a shift from indiscriminate killed to trying to divide communities.
Illia Djadi, senior analyst for sub-Saharan Africa at Open Doors International, told the newspaper that the militants appear to be using a “divide and conquer” strategy.
Chrysogone Zougmore, who leads the Burkinabe Movement for Human and Peoples’ Rights, told The Washington Post that the extremist attacks targetting Christian communities are “planting seeds of a religious conflict.”
“They want to create hate,” Zougmore explained. “They want to create differences between us.”
Muslim relatives of a pastor in eastern Uganda took him from his home and killed him for his faith this month, sources said.
Pastor Adinani Bulwa had fled Muslim opposition in northern Uganda and returned home to Muterere village, Bugiri District in January before he was killed on March 10. He was 42.
We began preaching to the family members, and in early February four Muslim relatives got converted to Christianity, but the first-born son in the family [Pastor Bulwa’s brother] resisted the Christian faith and gave a warning that we should stop misleading Muslims to Christianity,” said the pastor’s wife, Zabiina Newumbwe. “Two weeks later my husband was invited to attend a family meeting [at his parents’ house], where he was pressured to recant the Christian faith, but he said he was ready to die for Christ’s sake.”
On March 10 at about 9:30 p.m., several Muslim relatives arrived at their home, furious and shouting, she said.
“They were saying, ‘We are a Muslim family, and Allah is our God,’” Newumbwe told Morning Star News. “We were shaken, and the children and I hid ourselves in the bedroom while leaving my husband at the sitting room.”
The group forced their way inside and forced Pastor Bulwa outside, she said.
“About 200 meters away from the homestead, we heard a loud wailing,” she said. “We remained inside the house. My husband did not return. Early in the morning, I went to see a Christian neighbor who accompanied me to the scene of the incident only to see my husband at a distance half naked. I could not control my emotions and shouted in a loud voice. Thereafter I fainted due to shock.”
Pastor Bulwa’s body was found with a deep cut on the forehead, a cloth around his neck indicating he had been strangled and cuts on the left foot.
Hundreds of Christians and others arrived at the site, and the pastor’s family hurriedly buried his body. Family members told Newumbwe she would also be killed if she named those who killed her husband, she said.
Besides the widow, the pastor leaves behind five children, ages 4 to 16.
In 2016, Pastor Bulwa had moved his family to Lira, in the Northern Region of Uganda, where he ran a successful business, principally maize production. On Jan. 24, 2019, the family secretly converted from Islam to Christianity, and he was appointed pastor to other former Muslims at his church.
The converts from Islam under his pastoral guidance gathered secretly, but last December Muslims saw Pastor Bulwa and his family outside the church site in Lira, and word spread that he had become a Christian.
“Since December 2022, the Muslims started threatening to kill us if we continued missing attending the mosque,” Newumbwe said. “As the threats continued escalating, my husband decided that we leave Lira back to our home in Muterere village.”
The family fled Lira in January and began an evening fellowship at their home in Muterere, she said.
Since Pastor Bulwa’s death, she and her children have left their home and taken refuge at the house of someone assisting them.
“The children and I are living in great fear from the relatives – our security is at stake,” Newumbwe said. “We had to seek help elsewhere. We need prayers so that God may guide us on what to do next.”
The assault was the latest of many instances of persecution of Christians in Uganda that Morning Star News has documented.
Uganda’s constitution and other laws provide for religious freedom, including the right to propagate one’s faith and convert from one faith to another. Muslims make up no more than 12 percent of Uganda’s population, with high concentrations in eastern areas of the country.
Sources:christiannews
Nigeria– Muslim militants recently killed 17 unarmed Christians in the Ungwan Wakili community in the Zangon Kataf LGA of Nigeria’s Kaduna State. Kaduna is in the country’s dangerous Middle Belt region, where militants have attacked Christian communities for years. Though there are several reasons for the violence, one major motivation for the militants appears to be religious animosity, given its grossly disproportional targeting of Christian communities over the years.
In the most recent attack, the militants came at night using sophisticated weapons. A local ICC staffer reviewed pictures of 14 lifeless victims on the ground in Ungwan Wakili. Three more died of their wounds in the hospital, a community leader told ICC.
Local government officials said they will investigate the attack, accusing the military of allowing the attack despite the presence of military checkpoints nearby. Policing in Nigeria is directed by federal rather than local authorities. The militants have been attacking Christians in southern Kaduna and destroying their crops in recent months.
The governor of Kaduna, Nasir El-Rufai, has a long history of allowing attacks on Christian communities and punishing Christian communities who protest the security situation in the area. Since taking office as Governor of Kaduna State in May 2015, El-Rufai has repeatedly endangered Christian communities by ordering them into strict lockdowns. These lockdown orders, which trap villagers in their homes, prevent villagers from organizing early warning systems and make militant attacks even more deadly as villagers no longer have the warning they need to flee impending attacks.
Despite international condemnation of these lockdown orders, El-Rufai has continued to punish Christians through this technique. In 2020, he locked down a Christian-majority agricultural area for over two months during planting season. Militants, taking advantage of his lockdown orders, killed more than 100 Christian villagers during that time.
Sources:persecution
പോർട്ട്-ഓ-പ്രിൻസ്: കരീബിയൻ രാജ്യമായ ഹെയ്തിയിൽ കത്തോലിക്ക വൈദികനെ തട്ടിക്കൊണ്ടുപോയി. പോർട്ട്-ഓ-പ്രിൻസിലെ ക്രോയിക്സ് ഡെസ് ബൊക്കെറ്റ് എന്ന പ്രദേശത്ത് നിന്നാണ് ഫാ. ജീൻ-യെവ്സ് മെഡിഡോര് എന്ന മിഷ്ണറി വൈദികനെ തട്ടിക്കൊണ്ടുപോയത്. 1831-ല് സ്ഥാപിതമായ ക്ലെറിക്സ് ഓഫ് സെന്റ് വിയേറ്റര് സന്യാസ സമൂഹാംഗമായ വൈദികനെ മാർച്ച് 10 വെള്ളിയാഴ്ചയാണ് അക്രമികള് തട്ടിക്കൊണ്ടുപോയതെന്ന് പ്രാദേശിക മാധ്യമങ്ങള് റിപ്പോര്ട്ട് ചെയ്യുന്നു. വൈദികനെ കാറിൽ കയറ്റി ആയുധധാരി സംഘം തട്ടിക്കൊണ്ടുപോകുകയായിരിന്നുവെന്നാണ് വിവരം. പോർട്ട്-ഓ-പ്രിൻസിന്റെ പ്രാന്തപ്രദേശമായ ക്രോയിക്സ് ഡെസ് ബൊക്കെറ്റ്, തട്ടിക്കൊണ്ടുപോകല് നടത്തുന്ന 400 മാവോസോ എന്ന സായുധ സംഘത്തിന്റെ നിയന്ത്രണത്തിലാണ്.
വേദനാജനകമാണെന്നും വൈദികന്റെ മോചനത്തിനായി പ്രാര്ത്ഥന അഭ്യര്ത്ഥിക്കുന്നതായും ക്ലെറിക്സ് ഓഫ് സെന്റ് വിയേറ്റര് സന്യാസ സമൂഹം പ്രസ്താവിച്ചു. നേരത്തെ ഹെയ്തിയില് ക്ലരീഷ്യൻ മിഷ്ണറി വൈദികനെ തട്ടിക്കൊണ്ടു പോയി അദ്ദേഹം മോചിതനായി ദിവസങ്ങള് പിന്നിടും മുന്പാണ് മറ്റൊരു വൈദികനെ തട്ടിക്കൊണ്ടു പോയിരിക്കുന്നത്. കഴിഞ്ഞ ഏതാനും വര്ഷങ്ങളായി സായുധ സംഘട്ടനങ്ങളാലും സാമ്പത്തികവും, സാമൂഹ്യപരവുമായ പ്രശ്നങ്ങളാലും നട്ടം തിരിയുന്ന ഒരു രാജ്യമാണ് ഹെയ്തി. അപ്രതീക്ഷിതമായ അക്രമങ്ങള് കാരണം രാജ്യത്ത് അരക്ഷിതാവസ്ഥയും, ക്ഷാമവും, ദാരിദ്ര്യവും കൊള്ളയും കൊലപാതകവും പതിവു സംഭവങ്ങളാണ്.
കടപ്പാട് :പ്രവാചക ശബ്ദം
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