A Christian family who fled Iraq only to suffer again at the hands of Syrian Islamists in a refugee camp in the German town of Freising, eventually returned to Iraq when they could take no more, it was reported in early November.
‘They yelled at my wife and beat my child’, said the Iraqi father. Cases like this one are being reported from various parts of Germany. A young Syrian man in the German town of Giessen decided he could not stay when he heard violent threats from Islamists. ‘They shout Qur’anic verses’, he said. ‘These are words that the [Islamic State] shouts before they cut off people’s heads. I cannot stay here. I am a Christian.’
In the town of Hemer, in western Germany, Algerian refugees attacked a Christian Eritrean man and his pregnant wife with a glass bottle.
Joshua, a Pakistani Christian now living in Germany after he fled violence in Pakistan, said: ‘[Life] in the refugee camp is not really different from that in my home country. 98% of asylum seekers there are Muslims and threaten me, call me a Kufr, an unbeliever. I’m afraid there, very afraid. Mostly I stay in my room’.
In Berlin, Pastor Gottfried Martens is helping Christians fleeing the asylum centres because of the constant threat of attack. ‘Our Christian refugees are experiencing much oppression in the homes. They are abused, ostracised and even physically attacked’, he said. ‘Devout Muslims teach there the view: where we are, there is shari’a, there is our law’.
German authorities in Thuringia state have enforced a policy of separating refugees according to their religious background as soon as they arrive in the state. Other states may soon follow suit.
Western governments in denial
But if this is the situation in Europe, how much more anti-Christian persecution is happening in the Middle East? A United Nations aid worker in Jordan reported that Islamic State jihadists are active in the Middle East camps, killing people and kidnapping young girls and women to be sex slaves.
Yet still Western governments continue to insist that refugees will be rescued from camps in the Middle East, failing to understand that most Christians are too fearful to live in the camps because of the threat of anti-Christian attacks. Instead, many are taking shelter in schools, churches, and apartments, or with relatives where possible.
Through Operation Safe Havens, Barnabas Fund is rescuing Christians in danger in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, bringing them to countries of safety. Local churches in the receiving countries welcome the Christians on arrival, care for them and help them to settle in and find work and support themselves.
