Analysis: Isil knows its priorities – and killing Christians is one of them

For over two years, Isil have waged war on the religious mosaic of the Middle East. They have slaughtered all those they consider apostates in increasingly lurid fashion, targeting Christians, Yazidis, Shia Muslims, and countless Sunnis too. As their war extended into Europe, they chose methods – such as the vehicular butchery of Nice – that even Osama bin Laden had rejected as indiscriminate. But if Isil’s target list is broad, it is not without priorities.

In his speeches, Isil’s so-called caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has repeatedly picked out Christians and Jews as enemies of particular note. Isil adherents have already deliberately killed Jews on European soil, beginning with the attack on the Jewish Museum of Belgium back in May 2014. The only surprise is that churches have escaped violence for so long.

A war on Christians has for decades been an explicit part of the cocktail of fascist, fanatical, and fundamentalist ideas that make up Islamist extremism. In 1998, an infamous fatwa by Osama bin Laden declared jihad against Jews and ‘crusaders’. In the 2000s, as Iraq fell apart and violence then spread, the historic presence of Christianity in the Middle East came under virtually existential threat.

Christians made up 14 per cent of the region’s population in 1910; they comprise just 4 per cent today. Thousands of churches have been attacked, and over 100,000 Christians fled from Iraq alone. The killing of Father Jacques Hamel in Normandy yesterday, kneeling in his church, was foreshadowed in the countless such acts outside of Europe, such as the 16 Ethiopian Christians beheaded on a Libyan beach last year. Apart from the incalculable human cost of this wave of persecution, it represents an attack upon a millennia-old culture.

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