year’s explosion resulted in several deaths and many injuries. Please pray for effective government to be in place, for justice to prevail and for a functioning economy, so that all Lebanese can access sufficient food, fuel and housing. Pray too that the efforts of charities (such as Barnabas) working in the area will be blessed. Christians in Nigeria remain under severe threat from terrorist groups such as Boka Haram, but there is encouraging news about the students and staff abducted by gunmen from Bethel Baptist High School, Kaduna State in July 2020. Some escaped, but most of the 120 students were released in batches in the following months and now five more, plus the school’s matron, have also been freed, leaving four students in captivity. The President of the Nigerian Baptist Convention was delighted. ‘Glory be to God,’ he said. ‘Thank you for your prayers and support.’ It’s common to receive leaflets through the post encouraging us to make advanced preparations for our funerals, though most of us are concentrating on living! But burial for Christians is a recurrent problem in many parts of the world, including in Sri Lanka’s Hindu-majority eastern coast region where burial grounds are controlled by local temples. A deceased Christian woman in the region was buried according to Hindu rites after residents, village administrative officers and other government appointees argued that a Christian funeral was not permitted in the village cemetery and forced her daughters to agree. Sometimes the bodies of Christians are exhumed from temple-controlled burial grounds and discarded. Sri Lankan Christians, who make up 8% of the population, suffer discrimination, harassment and sometimes violence from Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu extremists. Since late August 2021, Turkey has appeared to use a supposedly anti-terrorist military campaign in Syria and Iraq to target HotPott - November 2021
Bethel student released, Nigeria; Godwin Isenyo
Christians and other minorities; at least 12 civilians have been killed and a hospital was bombed. An analyst in The Jerusalem Post states: ‘It is unclear why Turkey’s claims to fight “terrorism” often coincide with bombing minorities in Iraq and Syria and carrying out attacks against Christian, Kurdish and Yazidi minorities.’ Amy Austin Holmes, a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC, concurred and noted that Turkey’s military campaign has continued in Syria despite a ceasefire agreement being signed in October 2019. She also reported that in the first year of the agreement the ‘Assyrian Christian region of Tel Tamer was targeted every single month’. Turkey claims to be combating the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a proscribed terrorist group, but operations in Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan have indiscriminately targeted Christian and other civilian communities who have already suffered oppression, persecution and
Hagia Sophia, Istanbul
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