As Christian persecution rages, Joel Veldkamp, head of international communications at Christian Solidarity International, continues sounding the alarm on the dire state of affairs.
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Veldkamp recently appeared on the “Into the Supernatural” podcast to reveal five locations where he believes persecution has reached a fever pitch. The first nation he referenced is Nigeria, where he described a “slow-motion ethnic cleansing campaign.”
“There’s a region of the country called the Middle Belt, where most of the indigenous people who live there are Christians from hundreds of different people groups who are farmers,” he said.
“But there’s another tribe — a Muslim tribe called the Fulani — who are moving into this area, and they are extremely well-armed, and they formed a lot of militias, and, for the past eight years, really, they’ve been carrying out massacres of Christian villagers again, and again, and again on a weekly basis or more.”
Chaos in the region has led to a “slow expulsion of Christians,” with some recent events making international headlines. With each massacre, more and more believers leave the area.
“It is a stream of massacres, but it’s also a growing population of over a million people now who are just homeless, displaced, have no access to education or means of livelihood,” he said. “This is … probably the biggest persecution crisis in the world right now.”
Veldkamp also addressed other nations where persecution is raging, including Sudan, where he said there is a massive power struggle between “two Islamist factions” that used to run the nation together before turning on one another. The chaos has led to millions of deaths.
Sudan’s civil war broke out in April 2023 amid a struggle between the nation’s army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group. You can read more about that crisis here.
Veldkamp also spoke about Pakistan, Armenia, and Syria, addressing persecution issues unfolding inside these nations.
“Armenia … was a nation that converted to Christianity en masse in the year 301 AD,” she said. “And ever since then, its national identity, its culture has been intimately tied to Christianity.”
Veldkamp continued, “And this Christianity survived centuries of oppression by different empires, it survived the genocide of 1915, it survived 70 years of communist rule under communist Russia, and today, the genocide is continuing.”
He spoke about Azerbaijan targeting Armenia, as the mostly Christian-identifying population of Nagorno-Karabakh, a small landlocked region between the nations, was driven out.
“The entire population of this region called Nagorno-Karabakh, 120,000 people, had to flee from their lives to escape the … military advance,” Veldkamp said. “Today, the problem has kind of doubled in on itself because the Armenian government lost this war.”
He continued, “And when our government loses a war, you basically have two options, right? One is to say, ‘Sorry, everyone, we really screwed up. We’re going resign.’ The other is to say, ‘Actually, it was their fault,’ and that is what the Armenian government has decided to do. So they are blaming the refugees themselves for this problem, and they’re blaming the church in Armenia.”
Veldkamp said there are horrible issues now unfolding because of this, including arrests of faith leaders and other related problems. CSI has been in Armenia amid the troubling situation to support the refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh and make sure they have the resources that they need to preserve their community and their ability to advocate for themselves.
Meanwhile, Syria continues to face internal problems, with Veldkamp warning that Christians could face increasing problems.
“Syria is undergoing [a] slow Islamization process,” he said. “In other words, it’s becoming a lot more like Afghanistan than it used to be.”
The nation was ruled by a secular dictatorship until 2024, but recent developments have meant that the nation is now being led by Islamic leaders, with the new government headed by Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former al-Qaida member.
“This new president is really trying to show the international community, the West, that he’s a reasonable man, that he’s someone they can do business with, that they don’t have to be scared of him,” Veldkamp said. “Nevertheless, Syria is really going in the direction of major Islamization.”
Watch Veldkamp explain these issues among many others.
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