The persecution one’s spouse inflicts exacerbates the suffering of displacement.

South Sudan’s Juba. (Creative Commons, Abdul Sheriff Habibullah)

South Sudan’s JUBA A mother who suffered the illness of two of her babies and was physically assaulted for her Christian faith is one of the eight million people who have fled the fighting in Sudan.

At a camp for refugees in South Sudan, where they had fled Khartoum in June 2023, Fatima Adam, 41, said she was still in pain in the joints and bones of the leg that her Muslim husband had struck with a metal rod two months prior.

Adam was asleep at a makeshift shelter of the Gorom refugee camp outside of Juba when he attacked her, she said.

“Didn’t I order you to renounce your new faith and come back to Islam?” he told her. Having learned that she had continued attending worship services inside the camp, she told Morning Star News.

The beating required her to be rushed to a hospital, where she was under medication and other treatment for a week, she said.

Adam had accepted Christ at an evangelistic event a few weeks after her arrival at the refugee camp in June. She said her husband, noting she no longer recited Muslim prayers five times daily, learned of her new faith in January and began threatening her.

“I will kill you if you continue to follow this Jesus of yours—do not go to church again, and stop taking my kids to church,” he told her.

Adam lost two babies in a row shortly after arriving at the camp because there was not enough food, clean water to drink, or primary healthcare for the growing number of refugees. One baby was only six months old, and the other was one year old. She claimed that inadequate medical care was the reason they died.

Adam is the father of two other children, one of whom, a 22-year-old son, vanished from sight in Khartoum one year ago when hostilities broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

“Please pray for my son, who went missing because of the fighting in Sudan,” she prayed.

Over 14,600 people have died, and an estimated 8 million people have been internally and externally displaced as a result of fighting between the RSF and the SAF, which had shared military rule over Sudan after a coup in October 2021. The fighting has terrified civilians in Khartoum and elsewhere.

Christian sites have been targeted since the conflict began.

Gen. Abdelfattah al-Burhan of the SAF and his vice president at the time, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo of the RSF, were in charge when civil parties reached a consensus in March 2023 on a plan to restore democracy the following month. Nevertheless, differences regarding military organization hampered final approval.

Burhan sought to place the RSF—a paramilitary outfit with roots in the Janjaweed militias that had helped former strongman Omar al-Bashir put down rebels—under the regular army’s control within two years, while Dagolo would accept integration within ten years at the earliest. The conflict burst into military fighting on April 15, 2023.

Both military leaders have Islamist backgrounds while trying to portray themselves to the international community as pro-democracy advocates of religious freedom.

Sudan moved up from No. 10 to No. 8 on Open Doors’ 2024 World Watch List of nations where it is most challenging to be a Christian due to ongoing attacks by non-state actors and the local implementation of national religious freedom reforms.

Sudan, ranked No. 13 on the 2021 World Watch List, had fallen out of the top 10 for the first time in six years.

Following the fall of Bashir’s Islamist dictatorship in 2019, Sudan saw two years of progress toward greater religious freedom; however, on October 25, 2021, a military coup brought back the threat of state-sponsored persecution.

Following Bashir’s removal from office in April 2019 after 30 years in power, the transitional civilian-military government repealed several Sharia (Islamic law) provisions. Apostasy laws that made leaving Islam punishable by death were effectively repealed when it became illegal to refer to any religious group as “infidels.”

Christians in Sudan were afraid that after the coup on October 25, 2021, the harshest and most oppressive elements of Islamic law would resurface. After leading a transitional government after taking office in September 2019, Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok was placed under house arrest for nearly a month. He was eventually released and reinstated in November 2021, albeit with a fragile power-sharing arrangement.

It was Hamdock’s responsibility to remove the long-standing corruption and Islamist “deep state” from Bashir’s government. It is believed that during the coup on October 25, 2021, this deep state was what toppled the interim government.

In 2019, Sudan was removed from the list of countries of particular concern (CPC) that perpetrate or tolerate “systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom” and instead placed on a watch list by the U.S. State Department. From 1999 until 2018, Sudan was included in the CPC classification.

The State Department’s Special Watch List had Sudan removed as of December 2020.

Of Sudan’s population of over 43 million, an estimated 2 million are Christians, or 4.5 percent.