The slaughter of Christians has become a regular occurrence in sub-Saharan Africa, the Barnabas Fund reports on Saturday, and the “cause is Islamism.”
Hotspots of Islamic terrorist activity include the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), northern Mozambique, and northern and Middle Belt Nigeria, the Christian aid and persecution watchdog group asserts, and the perpetrators “are not just rebels or militants, but jihadists.”
The report notes that Islamic terrorists from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) are affiliated with the Islamic State and together with Islamic State Mozambique, they form the Islamic State Central Africa Province.
Mourners gather for the funeral of Florence Masika and Zakayo Masereka during their burial rituals in Mpondwe on June 18, 2023. Florence and Zakayo have been killed near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo by fleeing assailants whom the authorities believe to belong to the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a militia based in DR Congo. Grieving families prepared to bury their dead in western Uganda on Sunday while others desperately searched for loved ones still missing after militants killed dozens of students in a school attack (STUART TIBAWESWA/AFP via Getty Images).
The violence in Nigeria and across West Africa “is carried out by the Islamic State West Africa Province, jihadi group Boko Haram, and other Islamist extremists,” the document states.
Terrorist groups affiliated with the Islamic State or al-Qaeda “have proliferated across sub-Saharan Africa,” the group observes, leading some observers to make “sobering predictions of an African caliphate stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.”
Many secular governments and international bodies have condemned violence such as the recent atrocious massacre of Christian schoolchildren in Uganda but downplay the vital religious element in these attacks.
Massacres like that in Uganda are often blamed on “economic downturns, marginalization and lack of opportunity, corrupt or authoritarian government, or environmental problems that reduce the supply of arable and pastoral land,” but the simple fact is: “the victims were Christians who were targeted for that very reason,” the report points out.
Commentators too often ignore “the stated aim of Islamists across Africa: to kill as many Christians as they can,” it adds.
The ADF terrorists who carried out the Uganda massacre “have been slaughtering Christians in their hundreds in north-eastern DRC,” the text states, and in northern and Middle Belt Nigeria, “more than 11,000 Christians have been murdered by Islamists since 2015.”
Islamic State Mozambique (ISM) has rejoiced on social media when Christians are killed by “the soldiers of the caliphate,” and its leaders have boasted of building their Islamic province “on heaps of Christian corpses and rivers of their blood,” the report observes.
For its part, the Islamic State has called its slaughter of Christians and the burning of church buildings across Africa a “Harvest of African Christians.”
Thomas D. Williams is Breitbart Rome Bureau Chief and the author of The Coming Christian Persecution.