NAIROBI, Kenya — A mother of three children in Somalia is struggling to survive after her Muslim relatives drove her from their home and threatened to kill her for accepting Christ, she said.
The 31-year-old woman’s husband recently divorced her following her expulsion from the family homestead in Jamaame village, Kismayo in March, said the mother of children ages 5, 7 and 9.
“I do not regret embracing Christianity; I have great peace in my heart,” the mother, unidentified for security reasons, told Morning Star News. “Issa [Jesus] has been providing for me and the children for the last three months, and I know He will continue providing.”
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A Christian worker had shown her and her children the “Jesus Film” on Christmas Eve, she said.
“On January 20, I then decided to surrender my life to the Lordship of Issa, and since that time, I experienced amazing peace in my heart and life,” she told Morning Star News by telephone. “But as I continued watching the film while my husband was doing small business about 100 kilometers (62 miles) away in Lower Juba, I felt the need to share it with my parents.”
On March 1, during Ramadan, she showed the film to her mother. Her mother asked questions that she was unable to answer, so she invited her father to watch the film; the family watched it together on March 4.
“While watching the film on the suffering of Jesus on the cross, I found myself shedding tears and uttering the words, ‘Oh, an innocent Son of God suffering for the sins of humanity,’” she said. “My father was shocked to see me crying and asked why I was crying. He felt troubled with the uttering of Jesus as the Son of God.”
Her father told her that Christ was not the Son of God but only one of the prophets sent by Allah, adding, “The film is misleading and not from God — it is led by the devil.”
When she protested and replied that he was incorrect, he replied, “I have no room for you in my house anymore. Just go away with your children,” she said.
Her father immediately phoned her husband.
“My husband sided with my father that I should go away, and that I should not return to him,” she said.
Her father gave her three months to decide whether to return to Islam and her husband, she said.
“My mother tried to intervene, but my father became more furious and chased me and my mother away,” she said. “After a month, my mother denounced the Christian faith and returned to my father.”
On June 10, she told Morning Star News that her husband had divorced her according to Islamic law.
“When I received a phone call from my husband concerning my faith in Issa, I told him that I am still a believer of Issa as my Lord and Savior,” she said. “My husband then pronounced the Islamic phrase, ‘I divorce you,’ and that was the end of my marriage with him.”
Relatives and other members of the Muslim community have threatened to kill her, she said.
“I have received threatening messages from two of my relatives that it is better that they kill me than I be a Christian, since I have become an apostate and should be killed,” she said.
On June 13, she fled with her children to an area closer to the border with Kenya. Since then, they have been moving from village to village searching for manual work for their daily needs. She said she is in desperate need of financial support to rent a house, cover school fees for her children, and start a small business to support their upkeep.
“My prayer is that Issa, who changed my life, may touch my family too,” she said. “Please, I need the prayers from Christians at this difficult time. If God guides me to reach Kenya, then I am sure my needs and those of the children will be met by Christians living in different parts of the world.”
Somalia’s constitution establishes Islam as the state religion and prohibits the propagation of any other religion, according to the U.S. State Department. It also requires that laws comply with Sharia (Islamic law) principles, with no exceptions in application for non-Muslims.
The death penalty for apostasy is part of Islamic law according to mainstream schools of Islamic jurisprudence. An Islamic extremist group in Somalia, Al Shabaab, is allied with al Qaeda and adheres to the teachings.
Al Shabaab or Al Shabaab sympathizers have also killed several non-local people in northern Kenya since 2011, when Kenyan forces led an African coalition into Somalia against the rebels in response to terrorist attacks on tourists and others on Kenya’s coast.
Somalia is ranked No. 2 on Christian support group Open Doors’ 2025 World Watch List of the 50 countries where it’s most difficult to be a Christian.
This article was published at Morning Star News
Morning Star News is the only independent news service focusing exclusively on the persecution of Christians. The nonprofit’s mission is to provide complete, reliable, even-handed news in order to empower those in the free world to help persecuted Christians, and to encourage persecuted Christians by informing them that they are not alone in their suffering.
