The Muslim family of an 18-year-old Sudanese refugee in South Sudan’s northern border removed her from their home on Thursday night (January 8) because of her faith in Christ, officials said.
Amona Ibrahim Kaki, a refugee from Sudan’s Nuba Mountains region living in the Ajuntok refugee camp, came to faith in Christ after she secretly began reading the Bible.
After learning she was a believer in Christ on Christmas Day, the family was waiting to hear from her brother about her fate, sources said. On Thursday, relatives called and begged the younger brother to allow him to stay at home, but the younger brother angrily refused.
“This has never happened in our family before. You have to leave before I arrive or you don’t know what the consequences will be,” her brother angrily told relatives, sources said.
Neighbors who had been watching her alerted her family after she attended a service at Gloria Baptist Church in Ajung Tok on December 25. Her parents asked her why she went to church services. Mr. Kaki told them that he had a personal encounter with Jesus and was now a Christian.
Sources said her parents immediately became hostile and confiscated her cellphone in an attempt to isolate her from the Christian community. According to sources, her family warned her to renounce Christ and return to Islam or they would disown her, expel her from her home and require her to change her family’s name.
A source said, “She doesn’t know what the days ahead will bring for her.” “Young women are extremely vulnerable in these border areas, where family law and religious traditions are highly valued.”
Living in her home under a cloud of threat, she managed to send a message to local Christians, asking for prayers and emergency assistance as she faced an uncertain and dangerous future. At the time of writing, no aid agency was aware of her situation.
According to sources, Kaki found the Bible in her brother’s room last year.
“She found a Bible and started reading it every day,” he said. “When exam time came around, she started reading a verse every day before going to school. As a result of reading the Bible, she began to feel a change.”
She continued reading the Bible for a while. When Kaki became ill and medication didn’t help, she called her Christian friends and asked members of the local church to pray for her.
“She recovered after the church prayed for her, but her Muslim family thought she might be possessed by an evil spirit,” the source said. “Last November, she started losing interest in Islamic prayers and decided to believe in Jesus. She started avoiding bad friends.”
She attended church services for the first time on November 30, but members asked her why she attended despite being Muslim, although she did not make her faith public until the Christmas season. Kaki confessed that he met Christ and decided to become a Christian.
According to the Joshua Project, Sudan is 93% Muslim, with 4.3% of the population practicing traditional ethnic religions and 2.3% Christians.
Open Doors’ 2025 World Watch List (WWL) ranks Sudan fifth among the 50 most difficult countries to become a Christian, down from eighth the previous year. Sudan fell out of the top 10 of the WWL list for the first time in six years when it was ranked 13th for the first time in 2021.
In 2019, the U.S. State Department removed Sudan from its list of countries of particular concern (CPC) that commit or tolerate “systematic, persistent, and egregious violations of religious freedom,” and elevated it to its watch list. Sudan was designated as a CPC from 1999 to 2018.
In December 2020, the State Department removed Sudan from its special watch list.
