The last few decades have been terrible for Christians in the Levant and wider Middle East. The Iraq war and the rise of Islamic State and a myriad of other jihadist groups, as well as the Syrian Civil War, have led to a huge exodus from the region. A report in 2019, commissioned by Jeremy Hunt, the then Foreign Secretary, described the situation as near a “genocide”.
Since then, and especially this year, the position of Christians has deteriorated further, with state-sponsored persecution even occurring in countries with large Christian minorities. We have seen even more signs of the persecution of Christians in Syria since the fall of the Assad regime, and in May the Egyptian state turned its gaze on one of the most famous Christian sites in Egypt: St Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai.
