Although initially kept quiet and suppressed, the ongoing cries of a Coptic Christian family and supportive community concerning the latest Christian girl to “disappear” recently made the rounds on Arabic social media.
Earlier this month, Christina Karim Aziz, a 20-year-old Christian girl, disappeared off the streets of al-Fatah Center, in Assyut, where she had gone to apply for a job. Her family immediately went to police to report the disappearance; police responding with nothing. So her family has continued crying out to whoever will hear them—including by imploring President Sisi himself.
Perhaps the saddest aspect of this story is its recurring face. For those following the plight of Christian women in Egypt, their “disappearance” is and has been a very common occurrence. Not only do police seldom recover the missing girls; the authorities themselves often collude in the abduction.
Consider, for example, the case of Irene Ibrahim Shehata, a 21-year-old Christian who disappeared earlier this year under circumstances very similar to Christina’s, and even in the same governate of Assyut. A college student, she was on her way to take an exam at the Faculty of Medicine at Assyut National University, when she disappeared and her phone was turned off. Frantic family went to police, who were unresponsive. In the end, and as discussed in more detail here, it became clear that State Security was complicit. By the time the miserable family had made their (pointless) appeal to Sisi, they had learned that her religious ID had been changed to Muslim, “of her own free will,” though Security officials would not let the family meet with Irene to confirm these claims.
During their independent search, Irene’s family and investigators had also confirmed that a Muslim Brotherhood network—with a complicit State Security—is behind the abduction of many Coptic girls, describing it as “an organized terrorist group led by the Muslim Brotherhood to kidnap Christian girls in the Middle East.”
This entire phenomenon and process is well discussed in a 2020 report by Coptic Solidary (CS). Fifteen-pages long and titled “‘Jihad of the Womb’: Trafficking of Coptic Women & Girls in Egypt,” it documents “the widespread practice of abduction and trafficking” of Coptic girls. According to the report:
The capture and disappearance of Coptic women and minor girls is a bane of the Coptic community in Egypt, yet little has been done to address this scourge by the Egyptian or foreign governments, NGOs, or international bodies. According to a priest in the Minya Governorate, at least 15 girls go missing every year in his area alone. His own daughter was nearly kidnapped had he not been able to intervene in time…. The rampant trafficking of Coptic women and girls is a direct violation of their most basic rights to safety, freedom of movement, and freedom of conscience and belief. The crimes committed against these women must be urgently addressed by the Egyptian government, ending impunity for kidnappers, their accomplices, and police who refuse to perform their duties. Women who disappear and are never recovered must live an unimaginable nightmare. The large majority of these women are never reunited with their families or friends because police response in Egypt is dismissive and corrupt. There are countless families who report that police have either been complicit in the kidnapping or at the very least bribed into silence. If there is any hope for Coptic women in Egypt to have a merely ‘primitive’ level of equality, these incidents of trafficking must cease, and the perpetrators must be held accountable by the judiciary.
Since the publication of that CS report in September 2020, matters have only gotten worse. As a later report notes, “In Egypt, kidnappings and forced marriages of Christian women and girls to their Muslim abductors has reached record levels.”
In short, another front in the war of attrition has been launched against Egypt’s beleaguered Christian minority: the abduction and Islamization of their daughters—with what, by all counts, appears to be State help; and the numbers of casualties keeps growing, with no end in sight.