Speakers at the sixth annual International Religious Freedom Summit on Monday warned that religious freedom is rapidly deteriorating across several Middle Eastern countries, urging the United States, Western governments, and international bodies to take stronger action.
During a panel titled “Voices from Underreported Religious Communities Caught Amid Conflict,” Karmella Borashan of the Assyrian International Council described the long-term suffering of Assyrian Christians, tracing their plight to the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s fall in 2003 and the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War.
“Ever since, Assyrians faced systematic, subtle persecution from both the Jihadists and Kurdish forces, each using different tactics, and in Syria, lack of security and economic collapse specifically affects all Syrians, specifically Assyrian Christians as minorities,” Borashan said. “Many villages that once were very thriving, they remain largely empty.”
She added that conditions in Iraq remain dire. “In Iraq, they face violent attack by Islamist extremists,” Borashan said. “Assyrian archeological sites more than 3000 years [old] are being vandalized.”
Borashan also condemned the enforcement of so-called “minority laws,” which she said “forcibly convert children to Islam,” warning that Assyrian Christians do “not have a chance of survival.”
“Christianity is fading from the Middle East and [Christians] are placed in the mercy of the perpetrators,” she said. “Once we had 1.5 million Christians, now we have only less than 300,000 left.”
Borashan argued that what the region needs “is pluralism to bring the foundation of democracy.”
“Assyrian Christians were once a thriving and integral part of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, respected members of society with a Christian faith of more than 2000 years when Jesus came,” she said. “They have a history of more than 6,000 years. The West has repeatedly failed Assyrian Christians in the Middle East, abandoning them to the prominent powers that have persecuted and massacred them for generations.”
Kamal Fahmi of the advocacy organization Set My People Free highlighted the severe challenges facing religious minorities in Sudan, which has been embroiled in civil conflict since 2003 and ranks as the world’s fourth worst country for Christian persecution on the Open Doors World Watch List 2026.
“We have quite a number of victims who were executed or killed by their community because they left Islam,” Fahmi said. “Most of the time, they have to leave the country to go somewhere else. And also when they leave the country, sadly enough, even within the U.N. system, they don’t get relocation easily.”
“Now with the insecurity, with the coup of the army, with the fighting of the two factions, ex-Muslims are very vulnerable,” he said. “And sadly enough, this is not realized internationally, and nobody is working to really stop this. And they look at this as an impossible law which cannot be changed. And we have many people [who] are suffering.”
Keyvan Ghaderi of the Baha’is of Yemen, who was arrested for his beliefs in 2008 and imprisoned for four months, reflected on his experience behind bars. “In prison, our faith was tested like never before, and the majority of the inmates had never heard of the Baha’i faith,” he said.
According to Open Doors, which ranks Yemen as the world’s third worst country for Christian persecution, threats facing religious minorities “continue to escalate amid an unrelenting tide of conflict, extremism and economic collapse.”
“Religious freedom and equal citizenship are not abstract ideas. They are foundations of [a] just and harmonious society,” Ghaderi said. “For Yemen, these principles are not only urgent but essential for healing and rebuilding a nation torn apart by conflict and division.”
