According to Open Doors International, an organization that monitors and supports persecuted Christians, eight out of the 10 deadliest countries for Christians are in sub-Saharan Africa, where a reported 16.2 million Christians have been displaced.

Concern is growing over the whereabouts of Kevin Rideout, an American missionary abducted on October 21 in the West African state of Niger. The seizure of this 48-year-old pilot, who works for the U.S.-based organization Serving in Mission, has highlighted the ongoing plight of the people he serves—the region’s Christians, who face increasing violence at the hands of predatory jihadists.

Rideout is said to have been snatched by three armed men outside a hotel in the Chateau 1 neighborhood of the capital, Niamey—an area that is reputedly more secure than the rest of the city because it contains the country’s presidential palace. Rideout, who has lived in Niger since 2010, has not been heard from since his phone was last tracked in an area around 50 miles north of Niamey, where terrorists belonging to the Islamic State-Sahel Province (ISSP) maintain a large presence.

News of Rideout’s kidnapping has spread through Christian communities around the world, with many churches offering special prayers for his safety. Those monitoring his fate will be acutely aware of a pattern of kidnappings and ransom demands by jihadists in the region stretching back over a decade.

Kidnapping is a favored tactic of Islamist groups, as repeatedly witnessed in recent decades in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East. It has been similarly prevalent in the Sahel and West Africa more broadly, with one case—the kidnapping of nearly 300 Christian girls aged 16-18 by the Nigerian jihadist group Boko Haram—becoming an international cause célèbre in April 2014.

Since the early 2000s, ISSP and its Al-Qaeda-affiliated rival, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), have also kidnapped Westerners. Those seized have included several missionaries, stoking fears that Rideout was abducted because he is a Christian involved in missionary work as well as for any ransom that might be paid out on his behalf. In 2022, for example, an American nun in her 80s, Suellen Tennyson, was kidnapped by militants from her convent in Burkina Faso and freed five months later. Another American missionary, Jeff Woodke, was kidnapped by ISSP in Niger in 2016 and sold to JNIM before his release in 2023.

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