Police in North Khartoum, Sudan on Aug. 16 disrupted a funeral prayer meeting to arrest five South Sudanese Christians, church leaders said.
Pastor Peter Perpeny of the Presbyterian Church of Sudan and the four other Christians were arrested from the El-Haj Yousif area of East Nile District in North Khartoum, an area church leader said.
The Christians were apparently arrested as foreigners in the country illegally, but they have not been charged or told they would be deported, he said. Authorities in pockets of the civil-war ravaged country began targeting foreigners for deportation or forced relocation earlier this month.
Church leaders in Sudan said many Christians are living in fear of being arrested any moment, as police are reportedly going door to door detaining South Sudanese and Ethiopians nationals.
“In fact, there is a growing fear among the South Sudanese Christians, so they remain indoors in order to avoid being arrested,” said the area church leader whose name is withheld for security reasons.
The arrested Christians were taken to Omdurman Prison. Police have told one female detainee she must pay 600,000 Sudanese Pounds ($995 USD) or risk remaining in jail for six months, a “fine” that appears to be a bribe, the church leader said.
Muslim extremists had taken to social media urging officials to arrest South Sudanese Christians.
The area where they were arrested has been a stronghold of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has been battling the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) since April 15, 2023. Both the SAF and the RSF have attacked places of worship.
Conditions in Sudan worsened as civil war that broke out in April 2023 intensified. Sudan registered increases in the number of Christians killed and sexually assaulted and Christian homes and businesses attacked, according to Open Doors’ 2025 World Watch List (WWL) report.
“Christians of all backgrounds are trapped in the chaos, unable to flee. Churches are shelled, looted and occupied by the warring parties,” the report stated.
Both the RSF and the SAF are Islamist forces that have attacked displaced Christians on accusations of supporting the other’s combatants.
The conflict between the RSF and the SAF, which had shared military rule in Sudan following an October 2021 coup, has terrorized civilians in Khartoum and elsewhere, killing tens of thousands and displacing more than 11.9 million people within and beyond Sudan’ borders, according to the U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights (UNCHR).
The SAF’s Gen. Abdelfattah al-Burhan and his then-vice president, RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, were in power when civilian parties in March 2023 agreed on a framework to re-establish a democratic transition the next month, but disagreements over military structure torpedoed final approval.
Burhan sought to place the RSF – a paramilitary outfit with roots in the Janjaweed militias that had helped former strongman Omar Al-Bashir put down rebels – under the regular army’s control within two years, while Dagolo would accept integration within nothing fewer than 10 years.
Both military leaders have Islamist backgrounds while trying to portray themselves to the international community as pro-democracy advocates of religious freedom.
Sudan was ranked No. 5 among the 50 countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian in Open Doors’ 2025 World Watch List (WWL), down from No. 8 the prior year. Sudan had dropped out of the top 10 of the WWL list for the first time in six years when it first ranked No. 13 in 2021.
Following two years of advances in religious freedom in Sudan after the end of the Islamist dictatorship under Bashir in 2019, the specter of state-sponsored persecution returned with the military coup of Oct. 25, 2021. After Bashir was ousted from 30 years of power in April 2019, the transitional civilian-military government had managed to undo some sharia (Islamic law) provisions. It outlawed the labeling of any religious group “infidels” and thus effectively rescinded apostasy laws that made leaving Islam punishable by death.
With the Oct. 25, 2021 coup, Christians in Sudan feared the return of the most repressive and harsh aspects of Islamic law.
The U.S. State Department in 2019 removed Sudan from the list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) that engage in or tolerate “systematic, ongoing and egregious violations of religious freedom” and upgraded it to a watch list. Sudan had previously been designated as a CPC from 1999 to 2018.
In December 2020, the State Department removed Sudan from its Special Watch List.
The Christian population of Sudan is estimated at 2 million, or 4.5 percent of the total population of more than 43 million.
