Syria's ancient city of Aleppo, where this observer has visited the past few years and which is the former home of the beauties discussed in Part II of this Report, the number of Christians has declined from approximately from 250,000 to fewer than 15,000 according to church officials and Aleppo University faculty members I have discussed this subject with. This tragic diminution in the number of Christians in Aleppo is greater by far than that of Aleppo's overall population, which has declined from about 2.6 million to fewer than 1 million.
As of Easter Sunday Aleppo is just the latest to join the list of places in the Middle East where Christians have become an endangered species. In major parts of the Old City large numbers of displaced Muslims have now moved in, becoming the majority in the former primarily Christian districts. Meanwhile, jihadist extremism will likely not be buried under the rubble of eastern Aleppo but rather it will migrate and metastasize.
Even more than in Aleppo and Syria, the most Christians in this region forced to flee has been in Iraq, where they have been targeted by escalating sectarian clashes between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, hunted by various Al Qaeda inspired militia and forced to flee by the Islamic State. There were 1.4 million Christians in Iraq in 2003. Today there fewer than 80,000 thousand with hundreds more leaving each month. They are desperate to escape persecution that rivals that of Roman during the Church's infancy..
ISIS may or may not soon be defeated or replaced by a more vicious version and Christians and other minorities may receive short term protection in Ninewah Province, but many voices of despair, inside the Church are admitting that there is no likely future for Christians in Iraq. Increasingly students of the subject explain that it is also true of practically the whole Middle East.
In Egypt, five percent of the Egyptian population, or about 4 million people are Christian. The Pew Forum's recent report estimated that approximately 95% of Egyptians were Muslims in 2010, 96% in 2015. The Egyptian Parliament recently ratified bigotry when it passed a law imposing major restrictions on the construction and renovation of churches. No such restrictions apply to mosques. There are approximately 2000 churches in Egypt, compared with 120,600 mosques.
On Palm Sunday, 44 Coptic Christians celebrating Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem were martyred in terrorist attacks in Egypt and more than 100 were injured. The first bombing was at St. George's Church in Tanta, the second at St. Mark's in Alexandria. Copts make up around 10% of Egypt's population. They date from the first century A.D., when St. Mark, one of the Twelve Apostles, established the first church outside the Holy Land and became bishop of Alexandria.
To its credit, Egyptian police on 4/18/2017 arrested a man wanted for alleged involvement in twin church bombings this month claimed by the Islamic State one of 19 suspects whose names police made public after the Palm Sunday explosions. The Palm Sunday bombings followed an earlier attack by a suicide bomber who detonated his explosives in a packed Cairo church in December, killing 29 people.
The ISIS affiliate in the Sinai Peninsula claimed credit for the attacks of Egyptian Coptic Churches last week and in the past two years, it has carried out a series of gruesome killings of Christians, including the forced march of twenty-one Egyptian workers in Libya, all Coptic Christians, each clad in an orange prison jumpsuit, to a Mediterranean beach, where they were forced to kneel and then beheaded. ISIS threats against Christians have escalated since a suicide bombing on December 11th at St. Mark's Cathedral, in Cairo, killed more than two dozen Egyptians. After a February attack that killed seven Christians on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, the majority of Copts have fled the Sinai, according to Human Rights Watch.
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