The image of the Coptic Christians kneeling before their ISIS executioners in Libya has become one of the most iconic and haunting images of the threat Islamic extremism poses to Christians and other religious minorities. Image courtesy of Orthodox Christianity.

Those who claim that there would be peace in the Middle East if Palestine became a state miss the point that, while the Israel-Gaza conflict grabs headlines, it is actually a very small component of a much larger pattern of Muslim violence that continues across the Middle East, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Between 1999 and 2026, approximately 1,140,000 to 1,600,000 people were killed by Islamic extremists or Islamic religious-nationalists, while 10,125,000 to 14,215,000 were displaced. The victims were a wide range of ethnic and religious minorities, including other Muslims whom perpetrator groups considered heretics, infidels, or ethnic inferiors.

The victims were Yazidis, Alawites, Druze, Sunni Arabs in Iraq, Kurds, Jews and Israelis, Christians in Nigeria, Copts in Egypt, Assyrians and Syriacs, non-Arab Darfuris including the Masalit, Fur, Zaghawa, Tama, and Erenga, Christians in Sudan and the Nuba Mountains, Christians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Christians in the Central African Republic, Christians in Ethiopia and Amhara, and Christians in Eritrea.

The perpetrator groups include ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the IRGC, Boko Haram, ISWAP, Turkey and Turkish state forces, the Sudanese Armed Forces, the RSF/Janjaweed, SPLA-N breakaway militants, Séléka/ex-Séléka, anti-balaka, the Oromo Liberation Army, Amhara Fano militias, and the Eritrean government.

Islamic State
ISIS’s ledger against religious minorities is the longest in this survey. In August 2014, ISIS fighters swept into Sinjar and began a campaign the UN Human Rights Council later formally recognized as genocide against the Yazidi minority, 3,000 to 10,000 killed or captured in the opening assault, roughly 3,100 murdered outright, and over 6,800 women and children trafficked into slavery. A UN-backed household survey later confirmed the scale. Eleven years on, 190,000 to 200,000 Yazidis remain displaced in camps because Sinjar itself is still unlivable.

The same campaign reached Iraq’s Assyrian Christians on the Nineveh Plain that same August, driving the entire Assyrian population from the region, and reached Syria’s Assyrians six months later. On February 23, 2015, ISIS attacked 35 Khabur Valley villages, abducting 259 residents according to the most granular accounting available, though some retrospective reporting cites a toll as high as 800, a figure this survey treats as unverified pending independent corroboration.

ISIS’s war against Syria’s Kurds produced the single largest combatant toll in this entire document. The Kurdish-led SDF lost more than 11,000 fighters destroying the physical caliphate between 2014 and 2019, a toll independently confirmed at the time of ISIS’s territorial defeat. Along the way, ISIS massacred Kurdish civilians directly. The 2014 siege of Kobani alone killed more than 800 in six weeks of ground fighting, and a second incursion in 2015 resulted in the execution of 223 to 233 civilians in a single raid.

ISIS turned on Syria’s Druze twice. In July 2018, coordinated suicide bombings and house-to-house shootings in Sweida left 216 to 258 dead, at the time the worst violence to reach a province largely insulated from Syria’s war. Egypt’s Copts were struck repeatedly during the same period. ISIS bombings across a single six-month span in 2017 killed more than 110, and a February 2017 kill-list campaign in North Sinai drove 100 of 160 Christian families from the province entirely.

ISIS’s regional affiliates have exported the same tactic specifically against Christians. In eastern Congo, the ISIS-affiliated Allied Democratic Forces has made church attacks a signature tactic. A September 2025 funeral-wake massacre in Ntoyo village killed more than 60, with a coordinated same-night raid nearby bringing the two-day total past 100.

A July 2025 night-mass attack in Komanda killed at least 43 worshippers, according to UN peacekeepers on the ground. An April 2026 Holy Thursday raid on Bafwakao village killed 43 more, several of them beheaded, during Holy Week itself. Nigeria’s ISWAP, born of a 2016 Boko Haram split and formally pledged to ISIS, operates alongside Boko Haram in the section below.

Nigeria
Nigeria has been the deadliest country on earth for Christians for years running. Annual tolls fluctuate depending on tracking methodology, but Open Doors’ conservative count alone puts the number at 3,100 to 4,118 killed per year across the most recent reporting periods, accounting for 72 percent of all Christians killed worldwide for their faith in 2025–26 alone. A contested but widely cited 14-year figure from the International Committee on Nigeria puts the cumulative toll at 52,250 killed.

The violence predates the insurgency by a decade. Christian-Muslim communal riots have recurred since Nigeria’s 1999 return to civilian rule, killing more than 10,000 before Boko Haram existed. These included the 2000 Kaduna sharia riots (1,000 to 5,000), the 2001 Jos riots (over 1,000), and the 2004 Yelwa and Kano riots, with Yelwa alone reaching 500 to 900. What changed after 2009 was character rather than scale: sustained jihadist insurgency replaced communal riots under Boko Haram and its ISWAP offshoot.

Hamas
Hamas’s founding charter frames killing Jews as a religious obligation tied to the end times. That framing found its clearest operational expression on October 7, 2023: approximately 1,200 killed in a single morning, the deadliest day in Israeli history, with the cumulative toll from that assault and its aftermath reaching at least 1,665 through September 2025. The displacement that followed affected 200,000 to 250,000 Israelis, some of whom are only now, in 2026, scheduled to return.

Hezbollah and the IRGC
Hezbollah’s precursor cells carried out the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, killing 241 American servicemembers, later tied by US courts to direct Iranian government direction. From 1985 to 2000, Hezbollah fought a 15-year guerrilla war against the South Lebanon Army, a predominantly Maronite Christian militia backed by Israel, killing 621 to 1,050 SLA fighters by competing SLA and Hezbollah counts; when the SLA collapsed in 2000, roughly 10,000 Lebanese, mostly Maronite Christians, fled into Israel rather than remain under Hezbollah’s advance.

In 2006, a Hezbollah cross-border raid triggered a 34-day war in which Hezbollah fired more than 4,000 rockets into northern Israel, killing roughly 1,200 Lebanese and at least 159 Israelis. The October 2023 campaign followed the same pattern at greater volume: Hezbollah launched more than 8,000 rockets and other explosives into Israel in solidarity with Hamas, and by late 2024 the renewed conflict had killed more than 3,000 in Lebanon and 72 in Israel, including 30 Israeli soldiers.

Kurds Are Victims of Multiple Factions
Apart from those killed by ISIS, Kurds have also been targeted by multiple other perpetrators. Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime carried out the deadliest single campaign: the 1988 Anfal genocide, in which Iraqi forces killed 50,000 to 182,000 Kurds and destroyed more than 2,000 villages. This included the March 1988 chemical attack on Halabja, which alone killed nearly 5,000 civilians in a single day.

Turkey represents a separate, state-nationalist channel of violence. Kurds are overwhelmingly Muslim themselves, but that hasn’t spared them from being targeted as an ethnic minority by a Muslim-majority state. Turkey’s 2018 Afrin operation killed 86 to 160 and displaced 60,000, while its 2019 Peace Spring operation killed at least 218 and displaced up to 275,000.

Most urgently, the Syrian government now led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former al-Qaeda and HTS commander known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, launched an offensive against Kurdish-held Rojava in January 2026 that has displaced somewhere between 170,000 and nearly 300,000 people, according to competing counts.

The offensive has besieged the city of Kobane and prompted Genocide Watch to issue a formal emergency alert. It is the one situation in this entire survey still actively escalating as this is written, and its leadership’s jihadist lineage means it cannot be cleanly filed under “state nationalism, not jihadist doctrine” the way Turkey’s own operations can.

Syria’s Extremist Government Killing Minorities
Syria’s own minority massacres since Assad’s fall have followed the same intra-Muslim, intra-sectarian pattern seen in Iraq. In March 2025, militias aligned with Syria’s new government killed roughly 1,400 Alawites in coastal towns, per the UN’s own Commission of Inquiry.

Four months later, sectarian clashes in Sweida between Druze militias, Sunni Bedouin tribes, and government forces killed more than 2,000, including 789 Druze civilians the UN says were summarily executed by government security personnel. As of early 2026, roughly 120,000 Druze remain displaced, with entire villages still off-limits to return.

When Muslims kill Muslims
Sunni and Shia militias have been killing each other in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, with the February 2006 bombing of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra widely marking the descent into open civil war. UN monitors documented 34,452 civilians killed in 2006 alone, nearly triple the Iraqi government’s own count, and a disputed Johns Hopkins-MIT study put cumulative war deaths since 2003 as high as roughly 650,000.

The scope of the hatred is best illustrated by the July 2006 Hayy Al-Jihad massacre, in which Shia Mahdi Army militiamen killed 270 Sunni civilians in a single day. Iraq’s Sunni Arabs have separately been documented losing at least 30,000 killed since 2003 to Shia-aligned forces and militias, with Red Cross data citing as many as one million forcibly disappeared during the post-ISIS revenge-killing period of 2016 to 2020 alone.

Sudan
Sudan supplies the starkest example of Islamist-aligned forces turning on fellow Muslims by ethnicity rather than sect. The Janjaweed militia and its rebranded successor, the Rapid Support Forces, have carried out two distinct genocidal campaigns against Darfur’s non-Arab Muslim population, Masalit, Fur, and Zaghawa, twenty years apart.

The first, from 2003 to 2005, killed approximately 200,000, rising toward 300,000 by 2008 when disease and starvation deaths are included. The second, restarted in April 2023, saw 10,000 to 15,000 Masalit killed in the city of El Geneina alone in a single year, a toll that exceeded the UN’s own contemporaneous estimate for the whole country, a discrepancy UN monitors themselves flagged. Sudan is now the world’s largest displacement crisis, with 9.1 million people uprooted.

Sudan’s war has a distinct Christian dimension as well, separate from the Darfur ethnic genocide. In the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan, both the Sudanese army and a breakaway militant faction have targeted Christian clergy directly through 2025 and 2026, killing a Catholic priest at Holy Cross parish in Kauda in June 2026 and abducting and executing an Episcopal pastor the following month.

The killings sit inside a far larger displacement crisis: roughly 2 million displaced region-wide across the Nuba Mountains, per Christian Solidarity International, though that figure covers the broader Nuba population and isn’t Christian-specific.

Sudan’s overall civil war has killed approximately 150,000 and displaced 13 million nationwide, per Open Doors’ 2026 ranking, which moved Sudan to fourth on its global Christian persecution watch list.

Ethiopia
The Oromo Liberation Army has killed ethnic Amharas, who are overwhelmingly Ethiopian Orthodox Christian, in a string of massacres: over 400 killed at Gimbi in 2022, 150 killed at Gida Kiremu in 2021 (with 60 Oromo civilians killed in reprisal days later), and at least 54 rounded up and shot at a school in Gawa Quanqa in 2023. Church monitoring groups count at least 25 churches burned or looted in 2025 alone.

Central African Republic
The Central African Republic offers the clearest case of genuinely mutual sectarian atrocity in this survey. The mostly Muslim Séléka coalition seized power in 2013 and, per Human Rights Watch, committed months of brutality against Christian and other civilians, including farmers attacked in their fields and villagers accused of anti-balaka sympathies. Christian anti-balaka militias rose up in response and have since been documented killing Muslim civilians in return.

Sectarian fighting in the capital alone left more than 500 dead in a single week in December 2013, a Red Cross count made up mostly of Christian and a few animist victims.

Most of the above conflicts continue, and only the Israel-Hamas or Israel-Hezbollah conflicts would ostensibly be affected by recognition of Palestine. The takeaway from all of this is that the religion of peace is incompatible with other religions and races.

The post Christians, Kurds, Yazidis, Alawites, and Druze: Just How Many Have Been Killed by the Religion of Peace? appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.