Veldkamp recently appeared on the “Into the Supernatural” podcast to reveal five locations where he believes persecution has reached a fever pitch. The first nation he referenced is Nigeria, where he described a “slow-motion ethnic cleansing campaign.”
“There’s a region of the country called the Middle Belt, where most of the indigenous people who live there are Christians from hundreds of different people groups who are farmers,” he said.
“But there’s another tribe — a Muslim tribe called the Fulani — who are moving into this area, and they are extremely well-armed, and they formed a lot of militias, and, for the past eight years, really, they’ve been carrying out massacres of Christian villagers again, and again, and again on a weekly basis or more.”
Chaos in the region has led to a “slow expulsion of Christians,” with some recent events making international headlines. With each massacre, more and more believers leave the area.
“It is a stream of massacres, but it’s also a growing population of over a million people now who are just homeless, displaced, have no access to education or means of livelihood,” he said. “This is … probably the biggest persecution crisis in the world right now.”
Veldkamp also addressed other nations where persecution is raging, including Sudan, where he said there is a massive power struggle between “two Islamist factions” that used to run the nation together before turning on one another. The chaos has led to millions of deaths.
Sudan’s civil war broke out in April 2023 amid a struggle between the nation’s army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group. You can read more about that crisis here.
Veldkamp also spoke about Pakistan, Armenia, and Syria, addressing persecution issues unfolding inside these nations.
“Armenia … was a nation that converted to Christianity en masse in the year 301 AD,” she said. “And ever since then, its national identity, its culture has been intimately tied to Christianity.”
Veldkamp continued, “And this Christianity survived centuries of oppression by different empires, it survived the genocide of 1915, it survived 70 years of communist rule under communist Russia, and today, the genocide is continuing.”
He spoke about Azerbaijan targeting Armenia, as the mostly Christian-identifying population of Nagorno-Karabakh, a small landlocked region between the nations, was driven out.
“The entire population of this region called Nagorno-Karabakh, 120,000 people, had to flee from their lives to escape the … military advance,” Veldkamp said. “Today, the problem has kind of doubled in on itself because the Armenian government lost this war.”
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