(ZENIT News / Paris, 11.29.2025).- For years, European governments have described jihadist violence in abstract terms: an attack on “our values,” on “the Republic,” on “democracy.” Yet a newly surfaced intelligence brief from France’s Directorate-General for Internal Security (DGSI) cuts through that vocabulary with unusual bluntness. According to the analysis, Islamist terrorism has maintained a remarkably consistent priority for more than three decades: targeting Christians as such.
The report, obtained by Le Figaro, was published wake of the September 10 attack in Lyon, where Ashur Sarnaya — an Iraqi Christian, wheelchair-bound — was stabbed in what authorities have deemed an Islamist assault. It was the third such incident in France in 2025 alone. The timing has given the intelligence note a gravity that extends far beyond its technical language: this is not an episodic pattern, the DGSI argues, but a doctrinal strategy.
At the heart of the analysis lies one observation: within radical Islamist discourse, Christians occupy a symbolic position unmatched by any other group. From Al-Qaeda to the so-called Islamic State, Christians are framed with a torrent of labels — “infidels,” “idolaters,” “associators,” “crusaders.” This lexicon is not rhetorical ornament; it forms part of a narrative world in which Western political power, historical Christianity and contemporary Christian communities are fused into a single enemy identity.
In that worldview, the medieval crusades, 19th-century colonialism and 21st-century military interventions blur into a single grievance. Afghanistan, Mali, Iraq, Syria — separate histories in reality — become one continuous storyline of Islamic humiliation and Christian aggression. The effect is not simply theological but operational: violence is presented as the only legitimate response.
The intelligence note recalls how, as early as 2005, the jihadist strategist Abu Musab al-Suri urged radicals to provoke hostile reactions against Muslims in Europe, knowing that social fractures would accelerate recruitment. The target was never only the individual church or priest, but the cohesion of Western societies themselves. Attacking Christians, the analysis suggests, serves a double purpose: it inflicts immediate harm and inflames long-standing cultural fault lines.
The DGSI’s assessment is supported by a long record of public directives from jihadist leaders. Osama bin Laden’s 1998 “fatwa against Jews and Crusaders” set the tone for years to come. His successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, repeatedly framed global conflict in explicitly religious terms, casting Christianity and Islam as rival civilizations engaged in existential confrontation.
If Al-Qaeda provided the vocabulary, the Islamic State amplified it with ferocity. Its spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani boasted in 2014 of plans to “break the crosses,” “enslave Christian women,” and “conquer Rome.” The group’s French-language magazine urged followers to strike churches in order to “plant fear in their hearts.” Subsequent years brought similar calls: a 2020 jihadist communiqué insisting that France’s alleged “Islamophobia” be met with attacks on Christian sites; a 2024 ISIS campaign bluntly titled “Kill Them Wherever You Find Them,” naming Jews and Christians as designated enemies.
Behind this rhetoric lies a grim chronology of bloodshed. The DGSI reminds readers that the killing of Christian religious in Algeria during the 1990s was not an anomaly but an early chapter in a longer arc. In Pakistan, Al-Qaeda affiliates have contributed to decades of persecution. And the world has not forgotten the execution of 21 Egyptian Copts in Libya in 2015, filmed against the Mediterranean shoreline as a self-declared message “written in blood to the nation of the cross.”
Europe has had its own litany. The 2016 Berlin Christmas market attack, carried out by a Tunisian radical who had verbally abused Christian inmates in Italy, exposed motivations more explicitly anti-Christian than officials initially acknowledged. France, however, remains the most significant case. Plans to strike the Strasbourg cathedral and Christmas market were thwarted as early as 2000. Yet the threat did not fade.
In the past decade alone, the list is stark. A student radicalized online attempted attacks on churches in Villejuif in 2015 and considered striking the Sacré-Cœur. In Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in 2016, Father Jacques Hamel was murdered at the altar, a crime whose perpetrators spoke openly of avenging Islam against Christians. A car loaded with gas cylinders was abandoned near Notre-Dame later that year. A police officer was assaulted outside the cathedral in 2017. Three worshippers were killed in the 2020 Nice basilica attack. In 2021, a young woman preparing an attack on her local parish was arrested in Béziers.
This catalogue — partial, not exhaustive — reinforces the DGSI’s central conclusion: churches, clergy and Christian faithful have become privileged targets of jihadist violence. The threat is not random, nor merely symbolic. It is intentional, persistent and rooted in a long-developed ideological framework.
Yet this dimension has often remained unnamed in political debates across Europe. Officials have tended to describe such attacks in sociological or security terms, rarely acknowledging their explicitly anti-Christian character. For many European societies, where religious identity has faded from public consciousness, it may seem simpler to treat these incidents as assaults on “public order” or “social peace,” avoiding the uncomfortable admission that a community of believers is being singled out.
The DGSI’s analysis leaves little room for such evasions. Islamist extremism, at least in its doctrinal form, identifies Christianity as a central adversary — not because Christians are powerful, but because they represent, in jihadist imagination, the civilization that must be overturned.
For Christian communities across Europe, this produces a paradoxical landscape: they are weakened by secularization, yet targeted as if they still held uncontested cultural authority. Many European Christians today do not perceive themselves as a dominant force. But for those who craft jihadist propaganda, the West remains synonymous with the faith that shaped its past.
The intelligence brief does not prescribe solutions. But its clarity may force an overdue reckoning. To understand the current threat, policymakers must recognize its ideological center of gravity — and acknowledge that the violence is not only an attack on the state, but on a religious minority whose vulnerability has too often been overlooked.
In the long continuum of jihadist hostility, Christians stand at the crosshairs not for what they do, but for what they symbolize. The challenge for Europe now is whether it is willing — and able — to name that reality.
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