Catholic and Protestant believers also report that 1996 was the harshest year of persecution in China since the Mao period. In the Sudan, a jihad, or holy war, is being waged against Christians and the non-Muslim population. Christian mothers are forced to convert to Islam or watch their babies starve because the government has withheld food from them. Christian boys are taken from their families, put in government camps, forcibly converted to Islam and sent into war to be sacrificed as cannon fodder. In Saudi Arabia, Christianity is completely banned, and churches, Bibles, and Christian artifacts, symbols and literature are forbidden.
Police seek out and raid secret worship services taking place in private homes.
Thousands of foreign and national workers are in prison for their faith, and some have been beheaded. Human rights organizations report that oppression against Christians has worsened since the Gulf War. In Egypt, a group of Christians, believed to have been evangelized by the Apostle Mark in the first century, is vanishing under a violent onslaught by Muslim extremists. Tens of thousands of these people have been forced to flee their homes and either leave the country or convert to Islam. Many of their villages in the upper region were completely destroyed by violent, militant Muslim youths in early 1996.