Get ready for a story that will move your heart and challenge everything you thought you knew.

Today’s powerful testimony comes from Abdul Razak Sawadogo, a former jihadist from the wartorrn Sahel region of Burkina Faso.

Once his hands held weapons used to kill Christians and burned down their churches in hatred.

But one unforgettable night, as he was about to set fire to a church, something extraordinary happened.

Abdul Razak saw angels guarding the church and heard a voice calling his name.

A voice filled with a love he couldn’t understand.

That encounter changed his life forever.

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From a man filled with darkness and violence, Abdul Razak became a man transformed by grace, forgiveness, and the power of Jesus Christ.

His story is a living proof that no one is beyond redemption.

This isn’t just a story.

It’s a miracle happening in the heart of Burkina Faso, where faith burns brighter than any flame of hate.

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Listen and be blessed.

My name is Abdul Razak Sawado, but everyone called me Razak.

I am 28 years old now, and as I sit here telling you this story, I cannot stop looking at my hands.

These hands have done terrible things.

These hands have held weapons meant to kill.

These hands have poured gasoline on the houses of God.

These hands have pulled triggers that ended lives.

Lives of men, women, and even children whose only crime was believing in Jesus Christ.

But these same hands now shake when I lift them in prayer.

These same hands now hold a Bible instead of an AK-47.

These same hands now reach out to help instead of destroy.

How did I get here? How does a man go from being a jihadist fighter, a terrorist, a murderer of Christians to becoming a follower of the very Christ I once hated? That is what I want to tell you.

This is my testimony.

This is what Jesus did for me even when I was his enemy.

I was born in a small settlement near Jibo in the S province of northern Burkina Faso.

If you know anything about this region, you know it is hot, dusty, and hard.

Life there is not easy.

My people are fani.

Some call us po.

We are a proud people.

Historically nomadic herders moving with our cattle across the Sahel.

My father was a cattle herder, yes, but he was also something more important in our community.

He was a Quranic teacher, a man respected for his knowledge of Islam.

My father had two wives.

My mother was his second wife.

In our culture, this was normal, even expected for a man of his standing.

I had three brothers and two sisters.

Our home was a compound of simple mudbrick structures with thatched roofs.

We had very little in terms of material wealth, but we had something my father valued more than money.

We had Islam.

From the time I could walk, my father made sure I understood that Islam was not just our religion.

It was our identity, our pride, our very breath.

Every morning before the sun rose, my father would wake us for fajger, the dawn prayer.

I remember being so young, maybe four or 5 years old, stumbling out of sleep, my eyes barely open, following my father and brothers to the prayer mat.

The cold morning air would bite at my skin.

But my father would say that this small discomfort was nothing compared to the hellfire awaiting those who did not serve Allah faithfully.

After prayers, we would sit in a circle and my father would make us recite verses from the Quran.

By the time I was 7 years old, I had memorized several suras.

My father would beam with pride when I recited perfectly.

But it was not just the memorization that shaped me.

It was the stories my father told, the lessons woven into every teaching.

He would tell us about the enemies of Islam, about the kufur, the unbelievers, those who rejected the truth of the prophet Muhammad.

And among these enemies, Christians were always at the top of the list.

My father would say that Christians were confused people, people who worshiped three gods instead of one.

He said they believed a man Issa or Jesus as they called him was God himself which was sherk the greatest sin in Islam.

He said they had corrupted the true message that Allah sent down.

My father also told us stories about the colonial times about how white Christian missionaries came to Africa and tried to steal our souls.

how they told our ancestors that our ways were primitive and savage, how they used their religion as a tool for control.

He would say that even now Christians in Burkina Faso were agents of the West, that they served foreign interests, that they wanted to weaken Islam and destroy our way of life.

I absorbed every word.

To me, Christians were not just people with a different belief.

They were enemies.

They were dangerous.

I remember the first time I saw Christians up close.

I must have been about 8 or 9 years old.

My father took me to the market in Jibo.

It was a busy day.

People everywhere selling vegetables, grains, cloth tools.

The air smelled of dust and spices and sweat.

As we walked through the market, my father pointed to a group of people at one of the stalls.

They were aid workers wearing shirts with a cross symbol on them.

They were giving out bags of rice and bottles of clean water.

People were lining up to receive these things.

My father spat on the ground.

He told me those people were Christians, that they gave out food and water to trick people into converting, that their kindness was a trap.

He said they wanted to buy people’s souls with rice and medicine.

I watched them carefully, these Christians.

They looked normal to me, smiling, talking gently to people.

But my father’s words planted a seed in my heart.

I began to see them the way he saw them, as threats, as deceivers, as enemies of Allah.

There was one incident I will never forget.

It was during Ramadan, the holy month of fasting.

We had been fasting all day, and the sun was brutal.

My father and I were returning from checking on the cattle and we were both very thirsty.

We passed by a small shop owned by a Christian man.

I did not know he was Christian at first, but my father knew.

The man saw us and came out with a cup of water.

He offered it to my father kindly, seeing that we looked exhausted.

My father looked at the cup, then at the man, and then he did something that shocked me even as a child.

He knocked the cup out of the man’s hand.

The water spilled into the dust.

My father said the water was contaminated because it came from the hand of a cafir.

He pulled me away and we walked home in the burning heat.

I asked my father why he did that and he explained that accepting anything from a Christian, especially during Ramadan, would defile our fast.

He said their hands carried spiritual pollution.

That image stayed with me, the cup falling, the water wasted, the Christian man standing there with a hurt look on his face.

But instead of feeling sorry for the man, I felt proud of my father.

I thought he had defended Islam.

I thought he had shown strength.

As I grew older, this hatred became part of who I was.

I did not just learn it from my father.

I heard it everywhere.

From the imam at the mosque, from my teachers at the Quranic school, from my friends, from the older men in our community.

Christians were talked about as problems, as obstacles, as people who did not belong in our Muslim majority regions.

When we heard news that a Christian had been appointed to a government position, the men would shake their heads and complain that Muslims were losing their country.

When we heard about churches being built, they would say it was an invasion, that Christians were trying to take over.

There were not many Christians in our immediate area, but in the towns and cities, there were more of them.

Some of my distant relatives lived in Uagadugu, the capital.

And when they would visit, they would complain about how the Christians there were everywhere, how they had businesses, how they played their loud worship music on Sundays, how they were growing in number.

They would say that if we did not do something, Burkina Fasa would stop being a Muslim country.

This idea terrified me that the country my father loved, the country where we prayed five times a day, could somehow be taken over by these people who worshiped a man on a cross.

I remember being about 12 years old, sitting with my friends under a tree, talking about what we would do when we grew up.

Some boys wanted to be traitors.

Some wanted to be herders like their fathers.

Some wanted to move to the city.

But I said something different.

I said I wanted to fight for Allah.

I said I wanted to defend Islam from its enemies.

I said that one day I would rise up against the Christians and drive them out.

My friends laughed thinking I was just talking big.

But I was serious.

Even as a child, I had this fire in my heart, this anger, this sense of duty.

I truly believed that hating Christians was part of being a good Muslim.

When I became a teenager, things in Burkina Faso began to change.

It was around 2015 2016 we started hearing news about jihadist groups in Mali about how they were fighting to establish Islamic rule about how they were pushing back against the government and against the French forces.

These stories reached our region and some of the young men began to talk about them with admiration.

They would say that these fighters were true Muslims, that they were brave, that they were doing what all of us should be doing.

I listened to these conversations carefully.

There was a certain romance to it all, a sense that these men were heroes, warriors for God.

In our small poor village where life was hard and opportunities were few, the idea of being part of something bigger, something glorious, something that mattered to Allah, it was appealing.

We were told that the governments in our countries were corrupt, that they were puppets of the West, that they had abandoned true Islam.

We were told that the only way to restore the honor of Muslims was through jihad, through holy war.

Around this time, a group called Ansarul Islam began operating in northern Burkina Faso.

They were one of the first jihadist groups in our country.

They would come into villages, preach, recruit young men.

They promised purpose.

They promised dignity.

They promised paradise.

For boys like me who had grown up poor, who had grown up feeling like the world was unfair, who had grown up being taught that Islam was under attack, these promises meant everything.

But I did not join immediately.

My father, despite all his hatred for Christians, was not a supporter of violent jihad.

He believed in living according to the Quran, yes, but he did not believe in taking up arms unless absolutely necessary.

He would say that these young men going off to fight were being used, that they did not understand the true teachings of Islam.

My mother was even more against it.

She had already lost a cousin to violence in Mali, and she did not want her sons involved.

But I could not shake the feeling.

Every time I heard about a jihadist attack on a government building or on a church or on a school that taught Western curriculum, I felt a strange mixture of fear and excitement.

I felt like history was happening and I was just sitting on the sidelines.

I felt like Allah was calling men to fight and I was not answering.

By the time I was 19, I had made up my mind I would join.

I did not tell my parents at first.

I began attending secret meetings with recruiters from a group called JNIM, Jamaus al-Islam Muslim, which means the group for the support of Islam and Muslims.

This was a larger coalition of jihadist groups operating across the Sahel, including parts of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Nijair.

Their goal was clear.

To establish an Islamic caliphate, to enforce Sharia law, to drive out all foreign influence, and to eliminate anyone who stood the way, including Christians.

The recruiters spoke with such conviction.

They said that Christians in Burkina Faso were symbols of Western colonialism, that they served the interests of France and America, that they were infidels who needed to be removed so that the land could be purified for Islam.

They quoted verses from the Quran about fighting those who oppose Allah.

They said that every Christian we killed would be a step toward paradise, that Allah would reward us greatly.

I believed every word.

When I finally told my father I was joining, his reaction was complicated.

He did not celebrate, but he did not stop me either.

I think part of him was proud that his son was willing to fight for Islam even if he disagreed with the method.

He prayed over me, asked Allah to protect me, and then he let me go.

My mother cried.

She held on to me and begged me not to go, but I gently removed her hands.

I told her I was doing this for Allah, for our family, for our people.

I told her I would make her proud.

I was 20 years old when I left my village and went to the JNIM camp.

I did not know then that I was walking into darkness.

I did not know that I was about to become a man whose hands would be stained with the blood of innocent people.

I thought I was becoming a soldier of God.

I thought I was answering a holy call.

I remember the last time I looked back at my village as I walked away.

The sun was setting, casting an orange glow over the mud houses, over the livestock, over the land I had known my entire life.

I felt a strange sadness, but I pushed it down.

I told myself that this sadness was weakness, that a true mujahed, a true warrior for Allah did not look back.

So I turned my face forward and walked toward what I believed was my destiny.

If only I had known.

If only I could have seen what I would become.

If only someone had told me that the hatred I carried in my heart was not from God but from something much darker.

But I did not know.

And so I walked step by step into the shadows thinking I was walking into the light.

The journey to the JNIM camp took 2 days.

We traveled in the back of a pickup truck hidden under tarps, moving only at night to avoid government patrols.

There were six of us recruits, all young men between the ages of 18 and 25.

None of us spoke much during the journey.

I think we were all nervous, though none of us wanted to admit it.

We had made a choice that would change our lives forever.

And deep down, I think we all understood there was no turning back.

The camp was located in a remote area far from any town or village.

It was hidden in a landscape of rocky hills and sparse trees.

The kind of place where you could disappear and never be found.

When we arrived, I was struck by how organized everything was.

There were rows of tents, designated areas for training, storage for weapons and supplies, even a makeshift mosque.

There must have been over a hundred fighters there, maybe more.

Some were from Burkina Faso like me, but others had come from Mali, Nijair, even as far as Nigeria.

We were all united by one thing, our commitment to jihad.

The first week was orientation.

We were taught the rules of the camp, the chain of command, the daily schedule.

Every day began with fajer prayer followed by Quran recitation and religious instruction.

A senior imam, a man named Shik Ibrahim, led these sessions.

He was an older man, maybe in his 50s, with a long gray beard and intense eyes.

He spoke with authority.

And when he talked about Islam, about jihad, about our duty to Allah, everyone listened.

Shik Ibrahim taught us that the world was divided into two camps.

Dar al-Islam, the house of Islam, and Dar Al-Harb, the house of war.

He said that most of the world, including Burkina Faso, was currently Dar Al-Harb because it was not governed by true Sharia law.

He said it was our duty as Muslims to change this, to fight until Islam was supreme.

He said that anyone who opposed this mission, governments, foreign forces and especially Christians were enemies of Allah and needed to be dealt with accordingly.

Christians, he emphasized, were a particular problem.

He said they were increasing in number across West Africa, that they were building churches, converting Muslims, spreading lies about Islam.

He said they viewed us as backwards, as terrorists, as savages, when in fact they were the ones who had colonized our lands, stolen our resources, and tried to erase our identity.

He said that removing Christians from our territories was not just strategic.

It was spiritual.

It was about purifying the land for Allah.

I absorbed all of this teaching without question.

It confirmed everything I had been raised to believe.

It gave religious justification to the hatred I already carried.

And it made me feel like I was part of something important, something that would be remembered in history.

After the religious instruction, each morning we would train.

physical training first, running, climbing, exercises to build strength and endurance, then weapons training.

I had never held a gun before, but within a few weeks, I was being trained on the AK-47, learning how to load, aim, fire, clean, and maintain it.

We also learned about explosives, about ambush tactics, about how to move quietly and strike quickly.

The instructors were experienced fighters, men who had been in battles in Mali and other places.

They were patient but firm.

They told us that mistakes in training meant death in the field.

I remember the first time I fired an AK-47.

The recoil surprised me.

The loud crack of the gunshot ringing in my ears, even through the cloth I had wrapped around my head.

But after a few shots, I got used to it.

There was a strange sense of power in holding that weapon, in knowing that with a simple squeeze of the trigger, I could end a life.

The instructors praised those of us who showed promise.

I was a quick learner, and soon I was being recognized as one of the better shooters among the recruits.

But the physical training and weapons training were not the hardest part.

The hardest part was the mental conditioning, the process of being taught to see killing as worship.

Shik Ibraim would gather us in the evenings and tell us stories of the prophet Muhammad’s battles of the early Muslims who fought against overwhelming odds of martyrs who died for Islam and went straight to paradise.

He would say that we were following in their footsteps that every bullet we fired in the name of Allah was an act of devotion that every enemy we killed brought us closer to God.

He would also show us videos, propaganda videos made by jihadist groups in other countries.

Videos of battles, of victories, of enemies being executed.

Some of these videos were graphic and disturbing.

But we were told that this was the reality of jihad, that we needed to be prepared for it.

I watched men being beheaded, buildings being blown up, villages being raided.

At first, I felt sick.

But over time I became numb to it.

I began to see it as normal, even necessary.

There was a particular emphasis on targeting Christians.

Shik Ibrahim would explain that Christians in Burkina Faso were collaborators with the West that they served French and American interests that they undermined Muslim unity.

He would say that many of them were wealthy and influential, that they controlled businesses and had connections in the government.

He would say that by attacking them, we were not just defending Islam, we were also striking at the forces that kept our people poor and oppressed.

He would also say that Christians were weak, that they believed in turning the other cheek, that they would not fight back effectively.

He would say that this made them easy targets.

That attacking churches and Christian communities would send a message not just to them but to the government and to the world that we were serious.

That we would not tolerate their presence in our lands.

I listened to all of this and I believed it.

I convinced myself that Christians were not just different from me.

They were my enemies.

I convinced myself that their suffering was deserved, that it was part of Allah’s plan.

I convinced myself that I was doing something righteous.

After 3 months of training, I was considered ready for my first operation.

I was assigned to a unit of about 12 fighters led by a commander named Usman.

He was a tall, thin man in his early 30s with a scar running down the left side of his face.

He was known for being ruthless and effective.

He told us that our target was a small village about 50 km away.

Intelligence indicated that there was a small Christian community there and that they had recently built a church.

Our mission was to raid the village, destroy the church, and eliminate any resistance.

I remember the night before the attack.

I could not sleep.

I kept thinking about what was going to happen, about what I was going to do.

Part of me was excited.

This was what I had trained for.

This was my chance to prove myself.

But another part of me was afraid.

I had never killed anyone before.

I wondered if I would be able to do it, if I would freeze in the moment.

I prayed to Allah, asking him to give me strength, to guide my hand, to make me brave.

We left at dawn, traveling in three pickup trucks mounted with machine guns.

The landscape passed by.

Dry fields, scattered trees, small settlements in the distance.

I held my AK-47 tightly, my finger resting near the trigger.

The other fighters in my truck were quiet, focused.

Some of them had done this many times before.

For them, this was routine.

We reached the village just as the sun was fully up.

The commander gave the signal and we moved in quickly.

There was immediate chaos.

People screaming, running, trying to escape.

We fired shots into the air to create panic to make sure no one tried to resist.

Some of the villagers were Muslims and we told them to stay inside their homes, that we were not there for them.

But the Christians, we separated them.

We identified them by their homes, by the crosses some of them wore, by the fact that they tried to run toward the church.

The church was a small building, simple mud brick with a tin roof and a wooden cross on top.

A group of about 20 people, mostly women and children, had gathered inside, hoping it would be a place of safety.

Commander Usuzman ordered us to surround it.

He called out for them to come out, but they did not.

He ordered one of the fighters to fire a burst of rounds into the air as a warning.

Still, they did not come out.

Then an old man emerged.

He must have been in his 70s with gray hair and a thin frame.

He walked slowly, his hands raised.

He spoke in Moray, the local language, saying that they were peaceful people, that they had done nothing wrong, that they just wanted to worship God in their own way.

Commander Usman spat at his feet.

He said there was only one God, Allah, and one prophet, Muhammad, and that they were caffers for worshiping a dead man on a cross.

The old man tried to speak again, but Commander Usman shot him just like that, one bullet to the chest.

The old man fell to the ground, and there was a terrible silence.

And then the screaming started again from inside the church.

I stood there frozen.

I had just watched a man die, a man who was unarmed, who was begging for mercy, and my commander had killed him without hesitation.

I felt my hands shaking.

Commander Usman turned to me.

He told me to go inside the church and bring everyone out.

He said it was time for me to prove I was a true mujahed.

I do not remember walking to the church door.

I do not remember pushing it open.

What I remember is the faces inside.

Terrified faces.

Tear stre faces.

faces looking at me like I was a demon.

There were women clutching their children, young men trying to shield others with their bodies, an elderly woman on her knees praying.

They were speaking a moray and French begging for their lives, asking why we were doing this, saying they had done nothing to us.

I raised my weapon and shouted at them to come out.

My voice sounded strange to me, harsh and unfamiliar.

They hesitated and I shouted again.

Slowly they began to file out, hands raised, some of them crying, some of them silent with shock.

As they came out, the other fighters grabbed them, forced them to their knees in a line in front of the church.

Commander Usman walked along the line, looking at each of them.

He stopped in front of a young man, maybe in his 20s.

He asked him if he believed in Jesus Christ.

The young man, trembling, said yes.

Commander Usman asked him if he would renounce Jesus and accept Islam.

The young man was silent for a long moment and then he said very quietly that he could not.

Commander Usman pulled out his pistol and shot him in the head.

I will not describe what happened after that.

I will not give you the details of the horror that followed.

I will only say that by the time we left that village, the church was burned to the ground and many people were dead and I was one of the ones who had pulled the trigger.

When we returned to camp that evening, there was a celebration.

The other fighters congratulated us, said we had done well, said we had struck a blow for Islam.

Commander Usman praised me in front of everyone, said I had shown courage, that I was a true brother in jihad.

I smiled and accepted the praise.

But inside, I felt nothing.

I was numb.

I kept seeing the face of that young man, the one who had not renounced Jesus.

the moment before the bullet hit him.

That night, I tried to pray, but the words felt empty.

I tried to sleep, but I kept seeing the faces of the people in the church.

I told myself it was just the shock of my first operation, that it would get easier.

And in a way, I was right.

It did get easier.

Not because the horror went away, but because I learned to bury it, to push it down, to cover it with layers of ideology and anger and self-justification.

Over the next 2 years, from 2022 to 2024, I participated in dozens of operations.

We attacked villages, burned churches, kidnapped pastors, killed anyone who resisted.

The violence became routine.

I learned to turn off the part of my heart that felt compassion.

I learned to see Christians not as human beings but as obstacles, as targets, as enemies of Allah.

We believed we were winning.

By 2024, JNIM had a strong presence across northern and eastern Burkina Faso.

Hundreds of churches had been closed or destroyed.

Thousands of Christians had fled their homes, becoming refugees.

We heard reports that some areas were now completely Christian-free, that our efforts were succeeding in purifying the land for Islam.

But there were also moments, small moments, when doubt would creep in.

I remember one raid where we attacked a Christian school.

As we were forcing everyone out, a little girl, maybe 6 years old, looked up at me and asked me why I was angry, why I wanted to hurt them.

Her innocence pierced something in me, but I pushed it away.

I told myself she was being raised to be an enemy of Islam, that it was better to stop her now before she grew up to spread more lies.

I remember an elderly Christian woman we captured during another raid.

Instead of begging for her life, she prayed for us.

She prayed out loud, asking her God to forgive us, to open our eyes, to save our souls.

Commander Usman beat her for it.

But her words stayed with me.

What kind of person prays for the people who are about to kill them? It did not make sense.

There was also a Christian man we held for several days before executing him.

He was a pastor and Shik Ibrahim wanted to interrogate him to understand what he taught his followers.

During those days, I was assigned to guard him.

He did not curse us or beg.

Instead, he would quietly recite words from his Bible.

One day I asked him why he was not afraid to die.

He looked at me with tired eyes and said that death was not the end, that Jesus had defeated death and that nothing we did to his body could touch his soul.

I did not understand what he meant and I did not want to.

But his calmness unsettled me.

These moments were rare and I always pushed them aside.

I could not afford to doubt.

Doubt was dangerous.

Doubt would mean that everything I had done, all the blood on my hands, was for nothing.

So, I drowned the doubt with more violence, with more hatred, with more commitment to the cause.

By late 2024, we received reports that the government was making efforts to protect Christians, that President Ibrahim Troué, even though he was Muslim, was condemning our attacks and calling for unity between religious communities.

This enraged us.

We saw him as a traitor, as someone who had abandoned true Islam in favor of Western ideals of tolerance and coexistence.

We decided to increase our attacks to send a message that we would not stop until every church was gone and every Christian had either converted or fled.

In November 2024, our unit was given orders for an operation near Kaya in the center region.

Intelligence said there was a church there that had been holding services despite our warnings.

The Christians there were reportedly stubborn, refusing to leave despite the danger.

Commander Usman selected a team for the mission, and I volunteered to lead the group responsible for burning the church.

I had done this many times before.

I knew exactly how much gasoline to use, where to pour it, how to make sure the building would be completely destroyed.

As we prepared for the mission, I felt a familiar sense of purpose.

This was what I was good at.

This was my role in the jihad.

I sharpened my knife, checked my weapon, filled the jerry cans with fuel.

I prayed to Allah for success, asking him to make this operation swift and effective.

That night, as we loaded into the trucks and began the journey to the village, I had no idea that this would be my last mission as a jihadist.

I had no idea that in a few hours everything I believed, everything I had built my life on would come crashing down.

I had no idea that I was about to meet something, someone who would change me forever.

I thought I was riding toward another victory for Islam, but I was actually riding toward the moment when heaven would invade my darkness and nothing would ever be the same again.

We arrived at the outskirts of the village around 11:00 at night.

The moon was high but partially covered by clouds, giving just enough light to see but enough darkness to keep us hidden.

There were eight of us on this mission.

Commander Usman had stayed back at camp to coordinate other operations, so I was effectively in charge of this team.

Three fighters were assigned to secure the perimeter and watch for any government forces or armed villagers.

Two were positioned to intercept anyone trying to escape.

And three of us, including me, were tasked with the church itself.

The village was quiet.

Most people were asleep.

A few dim lights flickered in some of the homes, probably from kerosene lamps, but the streets were empty.

We moved silently using hand signals to communicate.

Our weapons ready.

This was a small operation, routine really.

We had done it so many times before that it felt almost mechanical.

Get in, destroy the church, get out quick and clean.

The church was located near the center of the village.

It was a modest structure, larger than some I had seen, but still simple.

mud brick walls painted white, a tin roof, and a wooden cross mounted on the front above the door.

There were no lights on inside.

It appeared empty, which was good.

We preferred not to have people inside when we burned churches.

Not because we cared about their lives.

We had killed many before, but because it was cleaner, less complicated.

Our goal was to destroy the building to send a message to make Christians feel unwelcome and unsafe.

We approached from the side, staying low, moving between the shadows of nearby buildings.

When we were about 50 m away, I stopped and signaled for the others to pause.

I scanned the area carefully, looking for any signs of guards or police.

Nothing.

The village seemed completely unaware of our presence.

But then something strange happened.

As I looked at the church, I felt something I had never felt before during an operation.

It was a feeling I cannot describe properly even now.

Like the air around the church was different, thicker somehow, but also lighter.

Like there was a presence there that I could not see but could sense.

I shook my head, thinking maybe I was just tired, that my mind was playing tricks on me.

I signaled for us to move forward.

We closed the distance to about 20 m.

I could now see the cross on the church more clearly, and I felt a strange tightness in my chest.

I ignored it.

I told myself it was nothing, just nerves or the adrenaline of the mission.

I motioned for the two other fighters with me to spread out, one to the left side of the building, one to the right.

I would take the front entrance.

We each carried a jerry can full of gasoline.

I moved toward the front door, my footsteps soft on the dusty ground.

The night was so quiet I could hear my own breathing, hear the slight slosh of the fuel in the container I carried.

I was about 10 m away when I saw them.

At first, I thought my eyes were deceiving me.

Standing around the church, spaced evenly like guards, were figures, tall figures dressed in white.

Their clothing was not like any fabric I had ever seen.

It seemed to glow faintly, as if it had light woven into it.

There were 12 of them, forming a perfect circle around the building.

They stood completely still, their hands at their sides, their faces calm.

I froze.

My heart began to pound.

I blinked hard, thinking this was some kind of hallucination.

Maybe from exhaustion or stress.

But when I opened my eyes, they were still there.

I looked over at the fighter to my left, expecting him to see them too, to react.

But he was moving forward normally as if nothing was wrong.

I looked to my right.

Same thing.

The other fighter was proceeding toward the church without any hesitation.

Could they not see what I was seeing? I stood there unable to move, staring at these figures.

They were not looking at me yet.

They were simply standing there, their presence both peaceful and overwhelming.

I have no other words for it.

It was as if the very air around them vibrated with power, but it was not a threatening power.

It was something else, something I had never encountered.

Then one of the other fighters hissed at me, asking why I had stopped.

His voice snapped me back to the moment.

I forced myself to move forward, telling myself that whatever I was seeing, it did not matter.

I had a mission to complete.

I had poured gasoline on churches a dozen times before.

This would be no different.

But as I got closer, the tightness in my chest grew stronger.

I was now about 5 m from the church door, close enough to smell the faint scent of wood and earth.

The beings in white had still not moved, but now I noticed something that made my blood run cold.

One of them, standing directly in front of the door where I was heading, slowly turned his head and looked at me.

His face, I cannot describe it fully.

It was human in shape, but there was something beyond human.

His eyes were deep, filled with something I did not understand.

Not anger, not fear.

something softer but also piercing.

It was like he could see through me, into me, past all my defenses and justifications, straight to the core of who I really was.

I wanted to run.

Every instinct screamed at me to drop the jerry can and flee.

But pride, training, stubbornness, I do not know what it was, kept me moving forward.

I reached the door and set the jerry can down.

My hands were shaking now.

I unscrewed the cap and began to pour the gasoline on the wooden door, then along the base of the wall.

The sharp smell filled my nostrils.

The other two fighters were doing the same on their sides of the building.

I could hear the splash of fuel hitting the ground, the muted sounds of them working, but I kept glancing at the figures.

They had not moved.

They simply stood there watching, watching me.

I finished pouring and pulled out a box of matches from my pocket.

My hands were shaking so badly I almost dropped it.

I struck a match.

The small flame flared to life bright against the darkness.

I held it for a moment, staring at it, and then I bent down to touch it to the gasoline soaked wood.

The flame went out.

I struck another match, touched it to the fuel.

It went out again.

A third match, same result.

I felt panic rising in my throat.

This made no sense.

Gasoline ignites easily.

I had done this so many times before.

I struck a fourth match, cupping my hand around it to protect it from any wind, though there was no wind.

I held it directly against the wet wood where the gasoline was pulled.

The flame touched the fuel and simply died.

One of the other fighters came around the corner, cursing under his breath.

He said his matches were not working either, that something was wrong.

The third fighter joined us, reporting the same problem.

We stood there, three grown men with weapons and fuel, unable to light a simple fire.

One of them pulled out a lighter.

He flicked it and a flame appeared.

Good.

He bent down and held it to the gasoline.

The flame burned steadily in his hand, but the moment it touched the fuel, it extinguished.

He tried again and again.

Nothing.

We were all confused now, frustrated, beginning to feel something else.

Fear though none of us would admit it.

One of the fighters suggested that maybe the fuel was bad, that perhaps it had been contaminated somehow, but that did not make sense either.

We had used fuel from the same batch just days before on another operation, and it had worked fine.

I looked up at the beings in white.

They had not moved.

They simply stood there, silent, watchful.

And then, as I stared at the one nearest to me, I heard something.

Not with my ears.

It was inside my head, inside my very soul.

A voice clear, gentle, but also carrying a weight that made my knees weak.

The voice said, “Abdul Razak, why do you persecute me?” I stumbled backward, my breath catching.

The voice knew my name.

It spoke directly to me.

I looked around wildly.

Had the others heard it? But they were still focused on trying to light the fire, arguing about what to do next.

They had heard nothing.

“Who are you?” I whispered into the darkness, not even sure if I was speaking aloud or in my mind.

The voice did not answer with words this time.

Instead, the being in front of me, the one who had looked at me, extended his hand slightly, palm up, as if offering something.

And suddenly I was overwhelmed.

I cannot explain it any other way.

It was like a wave of something crashed into me through me.

It was not pain, but it was not pleasant either.

It was like every wall I had built inside myself, every justification, every layer of hatred and violence I had wrapped around my heart, all of it was being stripped away in an instant.

And underneath all of that, I saw myself.

I saw what I really was.

I saw the faces of every person I had killed.

I saw them clearly, one after another, like images flashing before my eyes, but also searing into my soul.

The old man at the first church, the young man who would not renounce Jesus, the school children, the pastors, the women, the elders, all of them.

And I felt, “God, help me.

” I felt their pain.

I felt their fear.

I felt what it was like to be on the receiving end of my hatred, my violence, my cruelty.

I had spent 2 years learning to feel nothing when I killed.

I had trained myself to see Christians as less than human, as enemies, as obstacles.

But now, in this moment, I felt everything, and it was unbearable.

My legs gave out.

I fell to my knees, my weapon clattering to the ground beside me.

The jerry can tipped over, spilling the remaining gasoline into the dirt.

I tried to breathe, but my chest was so tight I could barely draw air.

Tears were streaming down my face.

When had I started crying? I had not cried in years, not since I was a child, but now I could not stop.

The beings in white remained motionless, but their presence pressed in around me.

I felt utterly exposed, utterly known, utterly condemned by my own actions.

I had thought I was serving God.

But in that moment, I knew I knew that what I had been doing was evil.

Not righteous, not holy, evil.

And the worst part was that I had known it all along.

Deep down, beneath all the ideology and the training and the hatred, some part of me had always known.

I had just buried it so deep that I could pretend it did not exist.

The voice spoke again, and this time it carried both sorrow and something else, something I could not identify at first.

It said, “You thought you were serving me, but I came to give life, not to take it.

I came to save, not to destroy.

” I wanted to respond, to argue, to defend myself, but I had no words.

What could I possibly say? My hands were covered in blood.

My soul was stained with the deaths of innocent people.

There was no defense, no justification that could stand in the presence of this this holiness.

Then I felt it.

The thing I could not identify before, it was love.

Somehow, impossibly in the midst of my guilt and shame and horror at what I had done, I felt loved.

Not approved of, my actions were clearly condemned, but loved.

me, Abdul Razak, the jihadist, the murderer, the burner of churches.

I was loved.

It made no sense.

It went against everything I understood about God, about justice, about how the universe worked.

How could I be loved in this moment? How could anything but wrath be directed at me? I tried to speak to ask this question, but before I could form words, everything went dark.

It was not like closing your eyes.

It was like the world itself disappeared.

I felt myself falling though I was already on the ground.

I felt weightless and heavy at the same time and then nothing.

I do not know how long I was unconscious.

When I began to come back to awareness, I heard shouting, distant at first, then closer.

My body was being dragged across rough ground.

My head bounced against something hard, sending a spike of pain through my skull.

I tried to open my eyes, but everything was blurry.

More shouting, gunfire, not directed at us, but somewhere in the village.

Warning shots probably, or villagers who had weapons defending their homes.

The attack had been compromised somehow.

We were retreating.

I felt myself being lifted and thrown into the back of a truck.

The engine roared to life.

Other bodies piled in around me.

My fellow fighters breathing hard, cursing, confused about what had gone wrong.

The truck lurched forward, and we sped away into the night.

I faded in and out of consciousness during the drive back to camp.

When I was aware, I heard the others talking, arguing about what had happened.

One said, “It must have been an ambush, that the military had been waiting for us.

” Another said, “No, there were no soldiers.

Something else had happened.

Something wrong with the fuel, with the matches, with everything.

” A third said I had collapsed for no reason, that I had started shaking and then just fell.

None of them mentioned the beings in white.

None of them had seen what I had seen.

We arrived at camp sometime before dawn.

I was carried to the medical area, a tent with some basic supplies and a fighter who had some training in treating wounds and illnesses.

He checked me over, feeling my forehead, looking into my eyes, asking if I was hurt.

I was not hurt physically, but I could not speak.

I could not explain what had happened.

My mind was full of images of that voice, of those faces.

They left me on a mat to rest, thinking perhaps I had some kind of fever or exhaustion.

I lay there as the sun rose, as the camp came to life around me, as the sounds of morning prayers and activity filtered through the tent walls.

But I was not present to any of it.

I was still at that church, still seeing those beings, still hearing that voice.

Why do you persecute me? Who had I been persecuting? I had been attacking Christians, yes, but the voice made it sound personal, as if I had been attacking the one speaking to me directly.

But who was the one speaking? Was it Allah? But this did not feel like Allah as I had been taught.

Allah was distant.

demanding obedience, ready to punish the unfaithful.

This presence had been different, close, sorrowful, loving, even in the midst of my evil.

I spent 3 days in that tent, unable to eat, barely able to drink water.

I drifted in and out of sleep.

And every time I slept, the dreams came.

Always the same.

The beings in white, the church, the voice.

Sometimes the beings would stand silently just watching me.

Sometimes they would move, walking toward me, though they never reached me before I woke.

Sometimes the voice would speak again, asking the same question.

Why do you persecute me? On the third night, the dream changed.

I saw one of the beings more clearly than before.

He was standing in front of me and behind him I could see something.

A shape, a structure.

It took me a moment to realize what it was.

A cross, a wooden cross, rough and heavy.

And then I saw that the being had wounds.

Wounds on his hands, wounds on his feet, a wound in his side.

Blood had run from these wounds, staining his white garments.

I woke with a gasp, sitting up so fast that I felt dizzy.

My heart was racing.

A cross, wounds, blood.

These were Christian symbols, Christian images.

Why was I seeing them? Was this some kind of curse? Had the Christians put a spell on me? But even as I thought this, I knew it was not true.

What I had experienced at that church was not witchcraft or magic.

It was something real, something more real than anything I had ever encountered.

Those beings were not demons or jin.

They were I did not have a word for it yet, but they were something else entirely.

Over the next week, I tried to go back to normal.

I attended the morning prayers.

I listened to Shik Ibrahim’s teachings.

I participated in training but everything felt hollow now.

When Shik Ibrahim talked about jihad, about killing the enemies of Islam, about purifying the land, I could not connect to his words anymore.

They sounded empty, like noise without meaning.

When we practiced with weapons, I held my AK-47, but my hands trembled.

When we watched propaganda videos, I had to look away.

The other fighters began to notice.

They would ask if I was okay, if I was still sick, if something was wrong.

I told them I was fine, just tired, still recovering.

But I was not fine.

I was breaking apart inside.

Another operation was planned.

A raid on a village suspected of harboring Christian refugees.

Commander Usman was selecting the team and I knew I should volunteer.

I always volunteered.

But when the moment came, I stayed silent.

The commander noticed.

He looked at me with narrowed eyes and asked if I was afraid, if I had lost my courage.

I said no, that I just needed more time to recover from whatever illness I had.

He did not look convinced, but he let it go.

I knew I could not stay much longer.

Doubt was dangerous in a jihadist camp.

If they suspected I was wavering in my commitment, if they thought I might betray them, they would kill me.

I had seen it happen to others, men who questioned too much, who showed weakness, who tried to leave.

Their bodies were found in the desert, examples to the rest of us of what happened to traitors.

But I also could not keep living this lie.

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