Christians among the victims in an unstable Yemen

Church of St. Francis of Assissi, Aden, 2013. Flickr/Brian Harrington Spier. Some rights reserved.Over the last year, Yemen’s brutal war has killed over 3,000 civilians and destroyed considerable
civilian property. Various armed groups, most notably the Houthis and other
Islamist forces, have taken over cities and towns in this overwhelmingly Muslim
country of 26 million. In much of the country, lawlessness reigns.

One community, Yemen’s Christians, has felt the
war’s impacts acutely. The estimated 41,000
Christians consist of both native Yemenis and refugees from abroad, though in
the past year many have fled the war-torn country.

‘John,’ as I’ll call him, is
a Yemeni Christian who used to run a library that included Christian literature
in Taizz, Yemen’s third-largest city. He described an increasingly dangerous
atmosphere for Christians in a country where militant Islamists are
increasingly gaining ground, and told me he has been receiving threats for
several years – mostly over Facebook – including from people labeling him an
apostate. However these threats never used to worry him. He knew that the local
police would never let anything happen to him.

On
23 February, 2015, a shipment of books, including Bibles and other Christian
literature, arrived for John at Taizz airport. Customs officials confiscated
the shipment, and an official involved in the case told Human Rights Watch that
other officials suggested burning the books because “they were offensive to the
community and religion.” He said that the same officials warned John’s lawyer
that he should be careful about “reckless men concerned with their religion
[who] may set [John]’s library on fire if the shipment were to enter the city.”

Fighting broke out in Taizz in March 2015 between supporters
of the northern Houthi forces and Islamist armed groups opposed to Houthi rule.
At that point, John said, attacks against him over social media intensified. Toward
the end of April, extremist elements became more active within the anti-Houthi
opposition in the city, and he had no choice but to flee.

It is no surprise that John is afraid to return home.

One of John’s neighbours told me that on the morning
of 27 September, about 15 armed, masked men dressed in black arrived in two
Toyota pickup trucks at the building housing John’s apartment and library. The
neighbour said he watched them “pack the Christian books in boxes from [John]’s
library and load them onto the cars.” He saw them burn the books in Souq
al-Sameel, a nearby public marketplace.

The neighbour recognised the leader of the group as a
well-known fighter in the city affiliated with Islamist armed group Al-Qaeda in
the Arabian Peninsula. The fighter questioned another neighbour about John’s “evangelising
and selling Christian books to people.”

John sent Human Rights Watch a photo of graffiti the armed men left
behind on his living room wall, which states in Arabic: “There is no God, but
God. Mohammed is the messenger of God; The Islamic State, God’s curse on
Christians.” His neighbours sent him a photo and said that other messages had
been left as well. It is no surprise that John is afraid to return home.

More recently, there have been three attacks on
Christian institutions in the southern port city of Aden, Yemen’s second-largest
city. Although the city is ostensibly under government control, Islamist armed
groups run rampant. On 15 September, gunmen stormed and burned down the Church of St. Joseph, one of four Christian churches in the
city. A witness said that several masked gunmen wearing white shirts with the Islamic
State logo emblazoned in black arrived at the church on motorbikes. When they
left a fire began to burn. By the time fire trucks arrived over 30 minutes later,
most of the church had burned down.

On 9 December, an explosion destroyed Aden’s
Immaculate Conception Catholic Church. Local residents alleged that Islamists
were responsible.

And on 4 March, four unidentified gunmen entered a Christian-run
retirement home in Aden and killed
at least 16 people, including guards, drivers, cooks, and four nuns, the media reported.
The gunmen also reportedly abducted an Indian priest. The attackers destroyed all the Christian symbols and
liturgical articles at the home. The home’s residents, who were not Christian,
were unharmed.

Uncovering who
carried out any of these attacks seems unlikely, and bringing them to justice
even less so. But for Christians and Yemen’s other dwindling minorities, the identity of the attackers
matters less than the reality that they are now being targeted with impunity
with little hope of protection from a divided, dysfunctional, and deteriorating
state.