For 15 year old Amira Hafez Wahib it was just a typical morning. The young girl attended a morning worship service at her church in the city of Luxor, Egypt, and then quickly stopped by a store nearby to pick up an item, telling her mother she'd be right back.
But Amira never came back and is still missing.
The girl's devastated family knows who her captive is: a Muslim man Yasser Mahmoud, a soldier who was assigned to protect their church and had attempted to abduct Amira before. However, despite the family's pleadings, government officials are doing nothing to help trace the young Christian girl, leaving her loved ones helpless and shattered.
Sadly, cases like Amira's are on the rise in Egypt.
Fox News reports that young Christian women are currently facing a greater risk of being kidnapped by extremists, tortured, and even forced to convert to Islam since the Arab Spring ended in 2011.
According to a report by the non-profit advocacy group International Christian Concern, this year has already seen an increasing number of incidents: there have been 500 reported cases of Christian women being attacked by Muslim men since 2011 and countless unreported cases.
Young Christian girls are often assaulted, raped, kidnapped, forced to change their faith and sometimes killed, the ICC said.
Another horrific incident occurred on April 1rst in Cairo, when a young Coptic Christian woman was brutally beaten and stabbed to death by a Muslim mob. She was reportedly targeted because of a cross hanging from her rear-view mirror.
However, very little is being done by local authorities to prevent these attacks.
"Not only are they turning a blind eye, they are often compliant," Issac Six, a spokesman for the ICC told FoxNews.com, recalling one incident where a father was assaulted by an officer for asking too many questions about efforts to have his abducted daughter returned.
"It's pervasive; police at the local level are not stopping the abductions. There needs to be more pressure from the top," he added. "We have seen cases before where we've seen victims returned when the police put pressure on the kidnappers. We know it's possible, unfortunately, the police are often complacent."
Six says this escalating problem is disregarded by the international community. To help resolve the issue, he believes the U.S. government needs to speak openly in dialogue with Egyptian leaders.
In February, President Barrack Obama dedicated his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast to the topic of religious freedom abroad, saying that "No society can truly succeed unless it guarantees the rights of all its peoples, including religious minorities, whether they're Ahmadiyya Muslims in Pakistan, or Baha'i in Iran, or Coptic Christians in Egypt."
However, Jeff King of the ICC says there has been no action taken on the part of the Obama administration to stop persecution.
"We were originally really encouraged by [Obama's speech]...But you look at the followup to that and there hasn't been any," he adds, noting that the president did not even bring up discrimination against Christians in his recent meeting with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, where churches are banned.
Experts say that the abuse against young Christian women is because of pervasive misogyny and Islamist indoctrination in addition to the Muslim Brotherhood's dwindling governmental power.
"There's a huge conflict between the Islamist and Christian populations in Egypt right now," Ryan Mauro, a National Security Analyst with the Clarion Project, told Fox News. "The Coptic Christians are supporting General el-Sisi because of the military's efforts to take the Muslim Brotherhood out of power." Because of this, radical Islamists are retaliating against Christians, he asserts.
The Brotherhood is not helping matters," Mauro said. "They incite the people to carry out these aggressive acts, but when the people carry them out, they denounce it. They know full well what they are doing."
