ICC Note: A new report highlights the incredible challenges that Christian communities in the Middle East face. There are a number of factors across the region that have led both to a significant decline in the population of Christians and to the physical attacks that so many Christians face. There are major challenges, but also clear steps that the United States and others can take to help protect and preserve the Christian communities.

03/12/2015 Middle East (Center for American Progress) Some of the oldest Christian communities in the world are disappearing in the very lands where their faith was born and first took root. During the past decade, Christians around the Middle East have been subject to vicious murders at the hands of terrorist groups, forced out of their ancestral lands by civil wars, suffered societal intolerance fomented by Islamist groups, and subjected to institutional discrimination found in the legal codes and official practices of many Middle Eastern countries.

The past year has seen brutal atrocities committed against Christians and others because of their religious identity by terrorist groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS. These incidents underscore the gravity of the situation. As a consequence, Christians have migrated from the region in increasing numbers, which is part of a longer-term exodus related to violence, persecution, and lack of economic opportunities stretching back decades. They have also moved to safe havens within the Middle East, and the Christian presence has become more concentrated in places such as Jordan, the area controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, and Lebanon.

Today’s overall Christian community in the Middle East is estimated to range from 7.5 million to 15 million individuals, with the largest numbers living in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. These estimates vary considerably because of the massive waves of forced migration over the past decade and the sharp growth in the number of Christians from the Middle East living in exile since the start of the new millennium. The total number of Christians remaining in the region has increased numerically since the start of the 20th century, but substantial growth in the non-Christian population combined with decades of migration mean that Christians represent less than 5 percent of the region’s overall population. In some places such as Turkey, this declining Christian presence has taken place over the past century. During World War I, 1915 was a particularly devastating year for Christians in the region.
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