Prayer for our MIssionaries in the Middle Easst

Christians Flee the Middle East

David Dolan - 4/4/2012 12:00 AM

 

Christians Flee the Middle East
When the Turkish Muslim Ottoman Empire controlled the Middle East a century ago, self professing Christians numbered around 20 per cent of the overall population. As is still true today, the largest number of Arab Christians were residents of Egypt. But other Arab countries, especially Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and the Holy Land, also had substantial Christian populations. Today, only around five per cent of the region's people call themselves Christians, giving the Middle East, the place where the world's largest faith was born, one of the smallest contemporary Christian populations on earth. Reports from Egypt say that around two hundred thousand Coptic Christians fled the country last year, due mainly to increasing attacks from extremist Muslim groups. The Christian flight from Iraq also continues to gain steam, with some 70 Iraqi churches destroyed in Baghdad alone since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Iraqi media reports say nearly half of the country's estimated one million Christians have left the country over the past eight years. Only in one Middle East country, Israel, has the Arab Christian population actually increased in the past decade.