Ten Years Later, A Martyrdom That Lingers

It was made to gather attention and it did. The producers of the video lavished all the technical expertise and artistry that they could muster and then proudly disseminated it broadly across every available media platform. It was called "A Message Signed With Blood To The Nation Of The Cross" and was released on February 15, 2015. The word "Blood" was in red.

It was, of course, an execution video of 21 Christians, 20 of them Egyptian Coptic Orthodox Christian construction workers in Libya, the 21st an African from Ghana. All of the Egyptians were from poor or working-class families in Upper Egypt, from Samalut. The perpetrators were Libyan members of the Islamic State or ISIS.[1]

The five-minute video, filled with layers of symbolism, was filmed on a beach near Sirte, "south of Rome, in Libya, the land of Islam." The victims were made to wear orange jumpsuits, like those worn by terrorist detainees held by the Americans. The victims were used by their victimizers to represent all Christians, and all Copts – the largest Christian church in the Middle East – "People of the Cross, followers of the hostile Egyptian church." After the Christians are beheaded, we see blood washing into the surf. It was, more than political, a religious statement, hostile to Christianity rather than against a specific government or president, rife with references to Islamic eschatology, an ISIS staple.

The video that appeared a decade ago came out during a period that was probably the apogee of the ISIS "Caliphate." Seven months before, in June 2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had declared himself Caliph in Mosul after the surprising fall of that city. By this time, the group not only controlled large swathes of Iraq and Syria but seemed to be developing a strong branch in Libya. It had a powerful online presence in addition to the physical territory it controlled.

They had been busy recently with the head-cutting. While this had happened previously in both Syria and Iraq, late 2014 saw a frenzy of beheading. In August 2014, the group beheaded hundreds of members of a rebellious Arab Muslim tribe, the Shaitat, in Syria.[2] That same month, they began beheading Westerners, beginning with American journalist James Foley and continuing in subsequent months with other American, British, French and Japanese captives.

Most of the ISIS empire would collapse in the next two years. Its great military victories would be replaced by ever more ambitious attention getting tactics, from high-profile attacks in the West, to exotic ways of killing its enemies recorded in high-definition video. Beheadings persisted but they were now joined by lovingly recorded depictions of people being burned alive or drowned. One video featured a Syrian soldier slowly being run over by a tank.

While remnants of the Islamic State survive in desert regions of Iraq and Syria, in Afghanistan and Somalia, the overwhelming majority of civilian deaths it carries out these days, especially targeting Christians and including beheadings, ranges from conflict zones in West Africa to Central Africa (the Democratic Republic of Congo) to the coastal region of Northern Mozambique. Hundreds of Christians were killed by ISIS local branches in Africa in 2024 alone, about half of those were beheaded.[3]

As for the Coptic Christians martyred on that beach a decade ago, they have fulfilled that old adage that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." Given that they were killed for their faith, died calling on Christ, and refused to apostatize, Coptic Patriarch Tawadros II declared them to be "martyrs and saints" within a week of their killing. The village where most of them came from, Al-Aour, is now known as "the village of the martyrs" and features a new church in their honor. Family members of the martyred have received some help and recognition from the state.[4] In an unprecedented modern gesture, Pope Francis in 2023 accepted these Coptic Orthodox martyrs as saints of the Catholic Church as well, listing them in the Roman Martyrology, the official compendium of martyrs of the Western Church. An international bestseller "The 21: A Journey into the Land of the Coptic Martyrs" by German Catholic novelist and journalist was published in 2019.[5]

And if the Jihadists have their own iconography, so do the Christians. These range from locally produced posters made in Egypt showing them wearing the crowns of martyrs to religious icons. A new animated video of "the 21" will premiere for the 10th anniversary.[6] One icon of the Martyrs of Libya, by Serbian artist Nikola Saric, was purchased in 2018 for the icon collection at Paris's prestigious Petit Palais Museum.

Modern icon by Nikola Saric of the Martyrs of Libya (Petit Palais, Paris)

The ISIS killers who carried out and publicized this slaughter thought they knew something about Christians, in their own twisted, Salafi-Jihadist way. But they did not know quite enough. They did not know, for example that the Coptic Calendar – different from that of other both Eastern and Western churches – begins literally in 284 A.D. with the persecution of Christians, especially in Egypt, by the Roman Emperor Diocletian. It is abbreviated as A.M. – in the year of the martyrs – in contrast to A.D. – in the year of our Lord – used elsewhere.

There have been other Coptic martyrs since then, victims of ISIS bombings of Egyptian churches and shooting of pilgrims, and many martyrs, known only to God, from the burnt-out hamlets and abandoned jungle villages of Africa. There were those martyrs in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday in 2019, in Baghdad in 2010, the four nuns martyred in Aden in 2016 and those martyrs in France killed inside their churches in Nice (2020) and Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray (2016).

According to many an Islamist cleric, the path to martyrdom does not just involve dying for the faith but also killing for it.[7] What Jihadist call "Martyrdom-Seeking Operations" are in fact supposed to involve the killing of someone else.[8] Jihad and martyrdom are closely linked, and that concept is not limited to one group alone but broadly believed.[9] For the Christian it is different, for this is a faith begun by a martyr himself who consoled others on his way to meet death. As Kierkegaard once wrote, "the tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins."

*Alberto M. Fernandez is Vice President of MEMRI.