CFI president Jim Jacobson said that much of the persecution against Christians is carried out in the Middle East by Islamic State militants.
"Islamic State militants in Iraq are using Christian churches as torture chambers where they force Christians to either convert to Islam or die," Jacobson told Breitbart.
"Islamic State militants are also stripping the former places of Christian worship of ancient relics which in turn are smuggled to Western collectors to help fund their terrorist activities."
ISIS destroys 1,500-year-old Saint Elian monastery in central Syria http://t.co/XTHhJJLJQL pic.twitter.com/NuF8kkCoos
— DAILY SABAH (@DailySabah) 21 августа 2015
Islamic State militants are known to have carried out mass evictions, forced migrations and killings of Christians and other religious and ethnic groups such as Yezidis, Kurds, Turkmens and Shabaks.
Members of the terrorist organization have publicized a number of their attacks on Christians, including the kidnapping and beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya in February 2015, and 30 Ethiopian Christians in April 2015.
ISIS released a video threatening Christians and executing by gunshot and beheading Ethiopian Christians in Libya. pic.twitter.com/gudqohAYNQ
— Breaking News (@NewsOnTheMin) 19 апреля 2015
Other militant Islamic groups have also targeted Christians for systematic persecution. In April 2014, 276 Christian schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haram militants from their school in northern Nigeria, and more than 200 are believed to remain imprisoned.
The CFI, a humanitarian aid organization which supports those persecuted because of their faith, has calculated that more Christians have been martyred in the 20th and 21st centuries alone than during the previous 19 centuries combined, and that every five minutes, a Christian is martyred for their faith.
