Around one million Syrian orphans may be in care of missionaries

As many as 800,000 Syrian children orphaned by the civil war could have been taken in by missionary organizations, a Turkish relief agency said in a recent report.

Muslim children worldwide who have lost their parents to war, disaster, disease and poverty, often fall into the hands of international missionary organizations committed to proselytizing, Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH) said in a report. The report, entitled "The Missionary and Missionary Activities for the Orphaned,” says 70 percent of the orphaned and abandoned children at Mission orphanages were born into Muslim families but later c onvertedto Christianity.

According to IHH, these missionary organizations are based in countries where people suffer from poverty and ignorance or Communist regimes have banned religious rituals -- for example the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia and southeastern parts of the Asian continent.

Only Save the Children, a US-based NGO, conducts missionary activities in more than 120 countries in Africa, Asia, Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean as a means of providing support for education, health, protection and disaster relief for as many as 166 million children, the IHH report says. S.O.S, another international charity based in the UK, centers its activities on persuading children to share Christian belief under the guise of caring for more than 70,000 children in around 125 countries, the report also states.

Nearly 400 million children worldwide have been orphaned by war, disease and poverty, the report says.

UNICEF provides a figure for orphaned children two times less than that of the IHH report in a paper that excludes 52 countries such as China, Afghanistan and Myanmar.