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This is the 30 minute TV version of Jan Jekielek’s interview with Charmaine Hedding. The longer-form version was released on Epoch TV on February 18, 2025.
🔴 Watch the extended version of this episode: https://ept.ms/Y0218CharmaineHedding
“We had a case of a little cell of Christian believers who were all converts from Islam, and they were meeting secretly. And they were infiltrated by a radical terrorist group called Al Shabaab, and they burnt down the house. They captured some of them, they took them onto the beach, and only two of them managed to survive, because they killed the rest of them.”
Charmaine Hedding is the founder and president of the Shai Fund, a humanitarian organization that aids, protects, and even rescues persecuted minorities throughout the Middle East and Africa.
Hedding about the Afghan translators left behind in Afghanistan and the certain death they faced: “The social security database had been given to the Taliban and some of these Christians, when this database had been made electronic and into a biometric system, thy had not wanted to deny Jesus, and so what they did is they wrote: ‘We are Christian.’ And of course, when it was handed over to the Taliban, they could immediately pull up who these Christians were, where they lived, what their phone numbers were, and they started hunting them down. And so I was contacted and asked if we can evacuate and help save some of these lives, of these Christians now on the run. Also, there were women who were judges and lawyers, and they had been put in place as a 40% quota by the Europeans and had adjudicated many cases of Taliban violations, human rights violations. So when the Taliban took over, these were the kinds of people that they immediately started to hunt down. The Ahmadiyya Muslims, which is a form of Islam that the Taliban doesn't agree with, their leadership was taken and they had young boys tortured and forced to sign false confessions, and they contacted me and said, Can you get us out?”
CHAPTER TITLES
0:00:00 - Emergence of Al-Shabaab and Evacuation Efforts
0:01:29 - Challenges in Evacuating Persecuted Individuals
0:07:48 - The Situation in Syria and the Role of Proxy Militias
0:11:27 - The Inclusive Model in Northeast Syria
0:13:41 - The Impact of the Nova Festival and Evacuation Efforts
0:22:30 - The Increase in Anti-Semitism and the Role of the Shai Fund
Charmaine Hedding about freedom of religion in the Middle East and in Africa: “In 2014, I watched as the Islamic State swept over Syria and Iraq. And I watched as the Yazidi and the Christian women were taken as sex slaves and sold in the markets of Raqqa and in Turkey and across the Middle East. And I thought to myself, ‘Who’s going to do something about this?’ The greatest struggle in the Middle East and in Africa, at the moment, is this concept of freedom of religion and belief.”
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