Governments in the West and the UN failed to offer Christians in countries such as Iraq and Syria the emergency help they needed as genocide got underway. If Christian organisations and other institutions had not filled the gap, the Christian presence could already have disappeared in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East, says the Aid to the Church report on the Christian persecution around the world.

The persecution against Christian is worse than any time in history. ACN says the persecution of Christians reached a new high between 2015 and 2017, as groups such as ISIS and Boko Haram stepped up attacks.

The report, Persecuted and Forgotten, found that, in Nigeria, the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram, in collusion with Fulani herdsmen, carried out a campaign of butchery, desecration of church buildings, and mass expulsion of Christians. In one diocese alone, Kafanchan, 71 Christian-majority villages were destroyed, and 988 people killed.

John Pontifex, co-author of the reports told Premier Radio, Christianity is on the brink of being wiped out in certain countries: “We’ve got a ticking bomb going on here, in that Christians in certain parts of the world haven’t got very much time left for their situation to be resolved. The ticking bomb is particularly expressed in the extent to which there is a migration of Christians. In Iraq there were 1.2 million Christians 15 years ago and there are now barely 200,000 left.”

Read full report here.

Watch our editor Marco Gombacci on the frontline in Raqqa with Christian soldiers defending Christianity in the North of Syria: