of State, because of their governments' engagement in, or toleration of, "severe violations of religious freedom". The same report recommends that Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, the Central African Republic, Cuba, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Sudan, and Turkey constitute the US State Department's "special watchlist" of countries in which the government allows or engages in "severe violations of religious freedom". Much of the persecution of Christians in recent times is perpetrated by non-state actors which are labelled "entities of particular concern" by the US State Department, including the Islamist groups Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Houthi movement in Yemen, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – Khorasan Province in Pakistan, al-Shabaab in Somalia, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic State and Tahrir al-Sham in Syria, as well as the United Wa State Army and participants in the Kachin conflict in Myanmar. Antiquity New Testament Early Christianity began as a sect among Second Temple Jews. Inter-communal dissension began almost immediately. According to the New Testament account, Saul of Tarsus prior to his conversion to Christianity persecuted early Judeo-Christians. According to the Acts of the Apostles, a year after the Roman Crucifixion of Jesus, Stephen was stoned for his transgressions of the Jewish law. And Saul (who later converted and was renamed Paul) acquiesced, looking on and witnessing Steven's death. Later, Paul begins a listing of his own sufferings after conversion in 2 Corinthians 11: "Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned ..." Early Judeo-Christian In 41 AD, Herod Agrippa, who already possessed the territory of Herod Antipas and Philip (his former colleagues in the Herodian Tetrarchy), obtained the title of King of the Jews, and in a sense, re-formed the Kingdom of Judea of Herod the Great (). Herod Agrippa was reportedly eager to endear himself to his Jewish subjects and continued the persecution in which James the Great lost his life, Saint Peter narrowly escaped and the rest of the apostles took flight. After Agrippa's death in 44, the Roman procuratorship began (before 41 they were Prefects in Iudaea Province) and those leaders maintained a neutral peace, until the procurator Porcius Festus died in 62 and the high priest Ananus ben Ananus took advantage of the power vacuum to attack the Church and execute James the Just, then leader of Jerusalem's Christians.