his seven years of house arrest. Local Christians believe the real reason behind the arrest of Yklas Kabduakasov is his conversion from Islam to Christianity and that he was sharing his Christian faith with Muslims.

Mali: A Swiss Christian missionary, who was abducted for 10 days in 2012, has been kidnapped again in Timbuktu. On January 8, Beatrice Stockly, a woman in her 40s, was taken from her home before dawn by armed men who arrived in four pickup trucks. Militant Islamic groups are active in the area in which she lives and had launched two attacks in the previous weeks, one of them on a Christian radio station just before Christmas, which left 25 people dead. In 2012, when the jihadis ruled the area, they outlawed the practiceof Christianity and desecrated and looted churches and other places of worship.

Pakistan: Yet another Christian girl was abducted by a group of Muslim men, forced to convert to Islam, and marry one of her kidnappers. The girl, 15-year-old Saima Bibi, was alone in a village in the Kasur district when she was seized. The family filed a complaint with police against her captors. Her parents hope that providing a birth certificate verifying her underage status will prove useful in the case, as the legal age for marriage in Pakistan is 16. Police, however, already confirmed that Saima has converted to Islam and officials have documents proving the marriage.

About this Series

While not all, or even most, Muslims are involved, persecution of Christians by Muslims is growing. The report entitled