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.
