Petr Jasek - Imprisoned with ISIS: Faith in the Face of Evil

Copyright 2020 by The Voice of the Martyrs

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To protect the Christians that VOM serves, and especially those Petr served with, certain names or identifying details in this story have been omitted or changed.

For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake

P HILIPPIANS 1:29

W hile millions in Sudan have struggled to live through extreme poverty, famine, and political instability, those who follow Jesus Christ in a nation governed by Sharia Law and Islamist leaders have long faced a much harsher existence. For three decades, the Sudanese government has targeted Christians, along with those who arent ethnically Arab, for extermination.

Since former President Omar Hassan al-Bashir rose to power in 1989 through a military coup and established a strict form of Islamic law throughout Sudan, his brutal regime intimidated, arrested, imprisoned, and tortured Christians. It also demolished and bombed church buildings, seeking to further Islamize the country.

In 1993, the United States listed Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism for harboring members of Islamic terrorist groups, including Osama bin Laden. In 2005, the countrys long-running civil war came to a halt with a peace agreement that later resulted in southern Sudan becoming an independent country in 2011. To quell civilian uprisings, Bashir enlisted Arab militias to terrorize civilians in the western Darfur region. As a result, roughly three hundred thousand people were killed and four million more were displaced.

Before the country split, Bashir orchestrated the deaths of nearly two million Christians in southern Sudan, including the Blue Nile region and the Nuba Mountains. In the Nuba region, the Sudanese military dropped more than four thousand bombs on Christian villages, churches, schools, and hospitals to erase all traces of Christianity. Believers there have been treated as criminals and often arrested, tortured, falsely charged, and punished with the death penalty.

In March 2009, The Hague-based International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for sixty-five-year-old Bashirthe first warrant ever for a sitting head of state. He was charged with committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, including mass extermination, deportation, torture, and rape in western Sudan. The following year, a second warrant was issued, this time for masterminding genocide in the province of Darfur.

Despite the warrants, Bashir continued to lead Sudan and terrorize Christians until April 11, 2019, when the Sudanese military ousted the dictator following several months of protests.

This story takes place inside Bashirs Sudan a few years before the despot lost his grip on the nation.

S unday, May 19, 2013

The heavy steel door slammed shut, caging me inside the suffocating room. The door was speckled with dirty beige paint, and near the top was a window, no larger than five by eight inches. Sitting on the freezing cold floor tiles, I looked at the small rectangle of light and felt forgotten.

My mind darted to my daughter, Vandaor Vva, as we call her. Shes a beautiful and intelligent young woman who would be graduating from medical school that week. But instead of being with her, celebrating one of the most important moments in her life, I was locked away within this cell. I felt a deep, throbbing sense of shame.

Suddenly, the walls around me began to blur, and the room dissolved into darkness. I felt my heart pounding relentlessly in my chest. Beads of sweat dripped down my forehead and pooled in my eyes, stinging them. I tried to move my limbs, but they didnt respond.

But then I felt a soft sensation. Beneath me was a sheet, a bed, a familiar and comforting place. My arm began to tingle, and I extended it across the bed to feel my wife, also named Vanda, who was sleeping beside me. I saw her long, blonde hair glowing in the rays of the morning dawn. She was as beautiful as she was on the day I married her twenty-three years earlier.

I breathed a sigh of relief and let my head sink back into my pillow. It was all a terrible dream. But then the questions began to come. They were like waves lapping against my mind.

Was the dream a message from God? A warning? What could I possibly have done to warrant being arrested and imprisoned?

We crawled out of bed and dressed for church. On that particular Sunday, members of our church in Kladno, in the Czech Republic, were visiting a sister congregation in Karlovy Varya quaint spa town near the German border.

Vanda and I got into our car and, along with some friends, embarked on the hour-and-a-half drive west. I said little on the journey through the rambling countryside. My thoughts were filled with questions about my dream.

How did I end up in prison? Did I make a mistake on my taxes?

We arrived at the church early, and I stepped out of the car to shake hands with a church elder who greeted us in the parking lot. He saw that I was distracted.

Petr, are you all right?

Im all right, I said. But everything inside me felt unsettled. No matter what I said or did, I couldnt shake the feeling Id had upon waking. I couldnt get the clicking sound of the prison lock out of my head.

For nearly three years, this dreamthe most vivid and disturbing of my lifewould sleep inside me, waiting to be awakened once again.

T wo and a half years later

It was shortly before 2:00 a.m. on December 10, 2015. I had been in Sudan for exactly four days, and I couldnt wait to be back home with my family. I felt the familiar emotion of eager anticipation as I thought about my wife, her delicious cooking, and the softness of my bed. In one hour, my flight would depart from Khartoum, so I took a few minutes before leaving my hotel room to use Skype to contact Vanda, who was waiting for me back home in Prague. I smiled as she answered. The call was short, but I hung up anxious to see my wife and ready to begin the journey home.