BY : Anugrah Kumar, Christian Post Contributor
A pastor in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains was executed extrajudicially along with six other people after members of an armed faction arrested him at his church residence in the town of Heban.
The Rev. Adil Idris Jangoul, of the Sudanese Episcopal Church, was detained on July 23 inside the church compound in Heban’s Erie neighborhood, where he lived, the religious freedom advocacy group Christian Solidarity Worldwide reported this week.
Members of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement-North, or SPLM/N, an armed group in the region, seized his money and arrested him without incident.
However, his body was later found on a road alongside those of six other people, all from the Otoro ethnic group. All seven had been killed in extrajudicial executions.
A related attack struck Heban the same day. Members of the Otoro ethnic group, the same community whose members had been killed alongside Jangoul, carried out the raid, killing at least 10 people and seizing more than 20 hostages, among them children, CSW said.
One hostage was the Rev. Yakoub Brahim Tia. He once served as general secretary of the Sudanese Church of Christ and belongs to the Shawaya ethnic group. Six of his relatives were also seized.
All the hostages were released unharmed on July 28, after ministers from several ethnic communities appealed for their freedom.
CSW President Mervyn Thomas said he was deeply troubled by the rising bloodshed, some of it apparently ethnically motivated. He called the killings especially perplexing because the Nuba Mountains had long been a place of peaceful coexistence, even through Sudan’s dictatorship and the civil war between the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, and the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF.
Thomas urged authorities to look into the killings and calm tensions without delay. He also praised religious leaders in the region for appealing for the hostages’ release and encouraged them to keep working toward peaceful coexistence.
Most members of the Otoro community are Christian, and it is the largest ethnic group in the area.
Conditions for Christians elsewhere in Sudan have also worsened, according to Open Doors, which supports persecuted Christians worldwide.
Authorities rely on longstanding Islamic statutes to justify forcing conversions to Islam and inflicting physical punishment on Christians, it said, and church buildings have been bombed or seized for use as militia bases, displacing congregations.
Some historical churches have been closed, denied registration, or had their property destroyed, it added. One church leader said his home and church had both been burned, along with their contents.
Christian women risk losing their inheritance, suffering domestic abuse and, sometimes, forced psychiatric care, according to Open Doors. Sexual violence is increasingly used against women and girls, with some taken captive and forced into sexual slavery, including in Gezira state, and gains in women’s rights have been rolled back since the 2021 coup.
Male Christians, especially church leaders, face surveillance and false terrorism charges, it said. Men who convert from Islam face beatings and imprisonment, and some have been abducted or killed by the RSF and allied militias.
Converts often fear that militias or relatives will discover their faith, and those who are exposed are frequently rejected by relatives and isolated by their communities. Converts from Islam face the greatest risk of persecution, threatened by government officials, extremist groups, families and communities.
The unrest traces back to Sudan’s 2021 military takeover and the war that began in 2023 between the SAF and RSF. Fighting has left church leaders frequently held without formal charges, leaving congregations without leadership.
The SPLM/N, allied with the RSF since 2025, controls most of South Kordofan state, which includes the Nuba Mountains, though the SAF still holds some towns in the region, according to groups monitoring Sudan’s civil war.
Rafat Samir, who leads a Sudanese church and chairs the Evangelical Community Council for Sudan, an alliance of Sudanese churches, said armed groups can act with impunity, even in cities once considered safe.
The pace of forced conversions has picked up this year, Open Doors said, while militia activity has increased amid growing insecurity nationwide. Christians are frequently targeted with extortion and violence in lawless areas, it added.
Sudan rose one spot this year to fourth place on the group’s World Watch List, an annual ranking of countries where Christians face the most persecution, placing it among the world’s most severe locations for anti-Christian violence, behind only North Korea, Somalia and Yemen, largely due to the civil war’s impact on persecution levels.
The federal advisory body U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom reported in March 2025 that the civil war was particularly affecting vulnerable religious populations in Sudan.
Samir said this is a period when the church must stand up for its rights.
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