Yemeni Christian Repeatedly Persecuted, Wife Martyred

In a small, dimly lit office in a Middle Eastern country, Khaled sits quietly on a couch with his hands folded in his lap and scans the room. This is where he’ll share the darkest memories of his family’s lives as Christians in Yemen — a country he and his four children fled following the silent martyrdom of his wife, Samira.

He’s surprisingly calm as he prepares to share the gritty details of his journey out of Islam and the countless incidents of persecution his family experienced as a result. He knows there’s a purpose to the pain he and his children still feel today.

“When I think about our story, the only thing I can think is that God is preparing us for something bigger … to serve Him,” Khaled says smiling. “It is in layer after layer of persecution that He changes us to be like Him.”

A Student of Islam

Khaled’s story of persecution begins where his faith in Islam ended.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Khaled led the call to prayer at his mosque in Yemen. Doubts about his father’s strict Wahhabism had already left cracks in his Muslim faith. Later that day, when Islamic terrorists crashed hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, his Islamic faith collapsed into a pile of rubble.

Khaled watched in horror as the shocking images recycled endlessly on a TV in a local café. The cheers of Muslims sitting nearby sickened him.

“I was really upset and sad,” he recalled. “Three thousand people were killed. I thought, ‘What kind of religion is that?’” Khaled immediately decided to leave Islam.

For the most part, Islam was all he had known. Born in Yemen in 1969, Khaled spent his formative years in Saudi Arabia. His father, an imam, favored Khaled over his other children because of his intellect. He even let Khaled lead him in prayer as they walked around the Kaaba in Mecca, Islam’s holiest site.

Khaled, who had always been taught that Christians were morally inferior, began questioning Islam after realizing that the Quran validated his father’s poor treatment, including beatings, of his mother. This angered Khaled.

“I knew by criticizing my father’s actions, I was criticizing Islam,” he recalled.

After his father died, Khaled temporarily walked away from Islam. In 1990 his family returned to Yemen, where his Muslim faith was replaced for the next four years with involvement in the Yemeni Socialist Party. However, his mother’s death some years later prompted a re-examination of his life, resulting in a return to Islam — this time as a Shiite. But he didn’t fully abandon his socialist beliefs.

In 1997, the year he married Samira, Khaled’s thoughts were turned to Jesus by an unlikely source. While reading a socialist newspaper, he came across a reference to John 8:7 — “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.” The words of Jesus shattered his misconceptions about Christianity, much as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks would ultimately demolish his concept of Muhammad and faith in Islam.

Secretly Finding Peace

Khaled supported his family by teaching Islamic studies and Arabic at a high school in Yemen, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Jesus’ words in John 8:7.

Later that year, Samira’s uncle gave Khaled some books he no longer wanted, including a Gospel of Matthew. He quickly read the text and eventually began to discuss Christ’s teachings with his students. Meanwhile, he hoped to find a copy of the full Bible.

Then one night a student of Khaled’s saw him at a gas station. The boy eagerly told him that a new Christian radio program, broadcast in a Yemeni dialect, had claimed that Jesus is God’s son. Khaled rushed home, found an old radio and climbed onto his roof to listen to the program in secret.

Khaled was in awe as he sat under the stars listening to biblical teaching on forgiveness and love. He trembled with excitement as he heard about Jesus’ love for him in his own dialect.

“I thought I was the only one who was considering Christianity,” he said, “so finding other Yemenis who were already Christians shocked me.”

Every night at 10:30 p.m., Khaled could be found on his roof. The more he listened to the program, the more questions he had. He eventually texted questions to the program’s hosts and later called by phone for a deeper conversation about Christianity. After weeks of discussions, he prayed with one of the hosts over the phone and placed his faith in Jesus as his savior.

The next morning, Khaled woke up feeling like a new man. “I felt like all the colors were different and the trees looked different,” he said. “I felt like a different person. I was a monster before that night. I was surprised at how much I changed.”

Despite his excitement, Khaled kept his conversion secret, even from his wife. Christian converts in Yemen face intense persecution from family members, villagers and the government. Several converts are killed each year, and those who aren’t killed face ongoing persecution and discrimination. Today, the church in Yemen is essentially invisible, with only a few thousand secret believers living there.

Khaled secretly obtained a Bible and continued to grow by reading God’s Word. He also became increasingly aware of how much he needed Jesus.

“I had a spiritual emptiness in me,” he said. “When I was a Muslim, I thought that socialism would fill my emptiness. When my mother died, I thought Shiite Islam would fill me. Eventually, the teachings of Christ and the Bible filled that void.”

Khaled soon joined several friends in a regular Bible study in a nearby city, but his frequent trips concerned Samira. She finally confronted him, worrying that he had found another wife.

“I love you,” Khaled told her tearfully, “but I have become a Christian.”

“Are you an infidel?” Samira asked.

“No, but I love Jesus,” he said. Khaled then shared how Jesus had changed his life and how He could change hers, too. Samira had noticed changes in her husband, including how he treated her and her parents, but she didn’t know what or who had inspired the changes. After learning the truth, she also accepted Christ.

Although Khaled and Samira stopped attending Mosque with their four children, they kept their Christian faith secret. They knew they could be killed for leaving Islam.

After two years of following Jesus, however, they decided to go public. When members of Khaled’s Bible study asked him if he would like to be baptized in the port city of Aden, Khaled felt ready to declare his Christian faith. He brought Samira and their children with him to Aden, and, on the spot, Samira also decided to be baptized.

Her decision to die to herself spiritually would ultimately lead to her physical death as well.

“Christians Burn in Hell”

In December 2012, members of the Muslim Brotherhood obtained pictures of Samira’s baptism and posted them on a Facebook page targeting evangelists in Yemen.

Days later, DVDs that included the baptism photos, the family’s address and the address of Khaled’s school were distributed in the village. Khaled was called “The Big Evangelist” in the DVD.

At work, Khaled’s fellow teachers began calling him an infidel. Then, one morning as he tutored a student before school, another teacher threw a large rock at Khaled, hitting him in the back. Two others then started beating him, and another threatened to kill him. Co-workers who were once his friends did nothing to help.

Although the beatings and death threats initially crippled Khaled with fear, over time they served to strengthen his faith. He came to realize that God had allowed these circumstances in order to build his courage. Reflecting on his walk with Christ, Khaled saw consistent evidence of God’s refining work.

“What I was afraid of in 2004, I was not afraid of in 2005,” he said. “What I was afraid of in 2007, I wasn’t afraid of in 2009.”

After the attack at school, Khaled’s troubles continued. Angry Muslims smashed the windows of his car and slashed its tires, villagers frequently threw rocks at his house, and someone poisoned his dog and her three puppies.

In 2013 the persecution grew even more intense. One day as Samira walked down a busy street, Khaled’s 22-year-old nephew approached her and pulled off her headscarf in front of a large crowd, a great shame in Yemeni culture. The nephew then beat her, breaking her arm, and dragged her down the street before leaving her crying and bleeding in the dirt.

Khaled tried to file a police report, but the police said his wife deserved the beating because she was a Christian. “[That] was the worst year for us,” Khaled said, sighing.

The persecution soon began to affect their children, too. Their son and three daughters were emotionally and verbally abused at school, with one teacher telling them that all Christians burn in hell. The children often came home crying.

By early 2014, they were receiving regular death threats and growing weary of the endless persecution.

“When I realized that everybody had been turning against us, even our closest friends and neighbors, I started to get afraid again,” Khaled admitted.

Looking to flee Yemen, Khaled contacted a Christian friend in another country and made plans for his family to move at the end of the school year. His plans were tragically altered, however, before they could leave.

The Worst Day

On the morning of June 9, 2014, Khaled was awakened by his son shaking him.

“Father, father! Mother is on fire in the kitchen!” his son cried.

Khaled jumped out of bed, ran into the kitchen and saw his beloved wife engulfed in flames. He struggled to extinguish the fire and remove Samira’s clothing as it burned her flesh.

While their daughters shrieked at the sight of their mother’s suffering, their son tried to help smother the flames. He suffered burns on his inner thighs and one of his arms. Once the fire was out, Khaled rushed Samira to the hospital.

Khaled later learned that someone had poured gasoline into Samira’s jar of cooking oil. Neighbors told him they had seen a man dressed as a woman breaking into their house a few days earlier, and Khaled thinks it could have been his nephew or another relative.

At the hospital, Samira’s doctor determined that she had third-degree burns over the upper half of her body. As hospital staff became aware of her Christian faith, the level of care she received diminished. Her nurse stopped changing her bandages, and her doctor forced Khaled to buy Samira’s medicine from the pharmacy with his own money.

The hospital also sent an imam to Samira’s room to read the Quran and pressure them to return to Islam.

By June 25, Khaled had had enough. He told Samira’s doctor he was going to move her to another hospital so she could receive better care.

“No, no; we will take care of her now,” the doctor assured him. He then told Khaled to buy a vial of a drug that included potassium. “This will heal her wounds,” he told Khaled.

When Khaled requested the vial, the pharmacist asked how it was to be used. After Khaled told him, the pharmacist called the doctor and argued with him about the drug. But the doctor had the final word.

The doctor injected Samira with the vial’s contents, and Khaled prayed and talked with his wife briefly before stepping outside to let her rest. When he returned two hours later, Samira was dead. She was 33.

After sharing this memory with us in the dimly lit office, Khaled paused as if holding onto those final precious moments with his wife.

He then told us about the surprising final words Samira spoke to him. Before she died, she told Khaled that she had forgiven everyone who had persecuted them, including the man responsible for her burns.

Ready for What’s Next

While no one knows the exact contents of the last injection Samira received, high doses of potassium chloride (the drug ordered by Samira’s doctor) are used in lethal injections to stop the heart. The drug could be available in a pharmacy, however, to be used in low doses as a potassium supplement.

“It does appear as if the doctor intentionally killed [Samira],” a VOM worker said. “Most likely, the doctor did not want her to live because she had left Islam.” After Samira died, villagers tried to discredit her and Khaled by spreading false rumors that she had set herself on fire because Khaled refused to let her return to Islam. Students from Khaled’s school even told him they had heard that he was the one who tampered with the cooking oil.

While admitting that it didn’t come easy, Khaled said by God’s grace he has forgiven those who persecuted his family. In 2016 he made it public in this Facebook post: “Everyone who persecuted me verbally, with their actions, by encouraging others to persecute me — any way direct or indirect — I forgive you.”

On Aug. 14, 2014, Khaled and his children finally left Yemen; VOM helped cover their remaining medical bills and relocation expenses. Although they have left the region where they suffered so much, Khaled said he and his children continue to mourn Samira’s death.

“We are a team that is playing with the shortage of a very key player,” he said. “We don’t have a goalie. I’m on offense, but we need someone on defense. We are really tired.”

Khaled earns a small income by teaching Arabic to refugee children, using passages of Scripture to build their vocabulary.

The family continues to experience persecution in their new majority Muslim country, even though it has a sizable Christian community. They have faced housing discrimination, the police have harassed him for carrying a Bible and his daughters are bullied at school. One teacher slapped his elder daughter for being a Christian.

Khaled is currently seeking asylum for his family in another country, and while waiting for resettlement he reaches out to family members and former students in Yemen through social media. Many have requested Bibles, and some have come to faith in Christ.

As he recalls his life in Yemen with Samira, Khaled sees how God used each layer of persecution to shape their faith, grow their courage and reveal His goodness and love through them. For that, he is grateful.

In fact, Khaled praises God for everything his family has endured, knowing that God continues to use their pain for His purposes. For example, his brother-in-law, who once angrily debated religion with Khaled online, recently finished a discussion by saying, “May the Lord Jesus Christ bless you.”

Moments like this encourage Khaled to continue sharing the gospel despite his broken heart. By losing everything, he has gained a much greater eternal perspective.

“Praise the Lord for what happened,” Khaled said, “because right now I have nothing to lose.”