Iraq

Climis and his son lay frozen on the floor, listening to the horrors on the other side of the door. Shrieks were followed by bullets. Children cried out. Explosion after explosion shook the walls.

The town of Batnaya, Iraq, has been home to Assyrian Christians for several centuries. But in 2014, ISIS razed the town to the ground in its deranged mission to rid Iraq of Christians.

Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan are three places in Central Asia where God is working and some specific ways to pray.

In a recent speech in London, the Rt Rev Bashar Warda pleaded with Western civil and religious leaders not to remain passive about the ongoing Iraq genocide. Warda, who is the Archbishop of Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, says that Iraqi Christians are facing extinction.

In June 2017, 130 Iraqi nationals living in the U.S. were detained and told they needed to repatriate to Iraq. Many of them are Iraqi Christians who fled persecution at the hands of ISIS.

For the first time since 2014, Christians in Northern Iraq were able to celebrate Easter in Mosul without a significant fear that they would be killed.  

"They let them straight through. The last thing they would think [a Chinese person could be] is a missionary,” Pastor Danny Lee says.