Le Figaro exclusive: DGSI report reveals 30+ years of jihadist anti-Christian hatred fueling attacks across Europe, from Lyon assault to global terror.
Newsroom (27/11/2025 Gaudium Press ) In a chilling assessment of one of the most enduring motifs in Islamist terrorism, France’s General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI) has detailed how anti-Christian hatred—framed as hostility toward “crusaders”—has remained a central pillar of jihadist ideology and violence for more than three decades.
The confidential summary note, obtained exclusively by Le Figaro, comes weeks after the third Islamist attack in France in 2025: the September 10 assault in Lyon on Ashur Sarnaya, an Iraqi Christian confined to a wheelchair. Investigators describe the attack as a stark illustration of a threat that has never truly receded.
“Christians are systematically designated by radical Islamist discourse as ‘unbelievers,’ ‘idolaters,’ ‘infidels,’ or ‘associationists’—those who associate another deity with Allah, thereby violating the principle of tawhid (the oneness of God),” the DGSI document states. This theological condemnation is then fused with historical grievances—the Crusades, European colonialism, and modern Western military interventions in Muslim-majority countries—to create a permanent justification for violence.
The rhetoric is not abstract. From Osama bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa against “Jews and Crusaders” to Islamic State spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani’s 2014 vow to “conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,” the message has been explicit and repetitive. Al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri framed global events as an eternal confrontation between Muslims and “the Crusaders and their allies.” Islamic State propaganda went further: its French-language magazine Dar al-Islam urged attacks on churches in 2015 to “instill fear in their hearts,” while the Thabat news agency in 2020 called for knife and vehicle assaults on Christian places of worship in response to perceived French “Islamophobia.” In January 2024, Islamic State relaunched an international campaign under the Quranic slogan “Kill them wherever you find them,” explicitly targeting Jews and Christians.
The human toll spans continents and decades. In 1990s Algeria, the Armed Islamic Group murdered at least 19 priests and religious figures. In Pakistan, al-Qaeda orchestrated repeated attacks on Christian communities throughout the 2000s. The 2015 filmed execution of 21 Egyptian Coptic workers on a Libyan beach—branded by Islamic State as “a message signed in blood to the nation of the cross”—shocked the world.
Europe has repeatedly borne the brunt. The 2016 Berlin Christmas market truck attack that killed 12, the throat-slitting of Father Jacques Hamel in his Normandy church the same year, and the 2020 beheading attack inside Nice’s Basilica of Notre-Dame are only the most visible episodes. Foiled plots tell a similar story: a 2000 plan to bomb Strasbourg Cathedral, Sid Ahmed Ghlam’s 2015 church attack scheme in Villejuif, a 2016 car bomb discovered near Notre-Dame in Paris, and a 2021 arrest in Béziers of a radicalized woman preparing to strike her local church.
Even outside headline attacks, low-level anti-Christian violence has surged. The Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe (OIDAC) recorded 337 anti-Christian incidents in Germany in 2024 alone, including 33 church arsons. In France, worshippers have faced tear-gas assaults during services and historic sites have been set ablaze.
The DGSI warns that the strategic objective extends beyond immediate casualties: jihadist ideologues, including the influential Abu Musab al-Suri as early as 2005, have openly sought to provoke European societies into anti-Muslim backlash, thereby accelerating radicalization and recruitment.
“Christianity is at the heart of the jihadist target,” the intelligence note concludes bluntly, urging realism in the face of a threat many European leaders have preferred to downplay or reframe as generic extremism.
With the Lyon attack against Ashur Sarnaya serving as the latest reminder, French authorities are confronting a hatred that shows no sign of abating—and a ideological war declared, in the terrorists’ own words, against the cross itself.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from Le Figaro
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