between 450,000 and 200,000 Christians left in Iraq. During that period, actions against Christians included the burning and bombing of churches, the bombing of Christian owned businesses and homes, kidnapping, murder, demands for protection money, and anti-Christian rhetoric in the media with those responsible saying that they wanted to rid the country of its Christians. A report which was released by the UK's Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and prepared by Philip Mounstephen, the Bishop of Truro, in July 2019, and a report on worldwide restrictions on religious freedom by the PEW organization, both stated that the number of countries where Christians were suffering as a result of religious persecution was increasing, rising from 125 in 2015 to 144 as of 2018. PEW has published a caution concerning the interpretation of its numbers: "The Center's recent report ... does not attempt to estimate the number of victims in each country... it does not speak to the intensity of harassment..." The Internationale Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte – the International Society for Human Rights – in Frankfurt, Germany, is a non-governmental organization with 30,000 members from 38 countries who monitor human rights. In September 2009, then chairman Martin Lessenthin, issued a report estimating that 80% of acts of religious persecution around the world were aimed at Christians at that time. W. J. Blumenfeld says that Christianity enjoys dominant group privilege in the US and some other Western societies. Christianity is, numerically, the largest religion in the U.S. according to PEW, with 43% of Americans identifying themselves as Protestants and one in five (20%) of Americans identifying themselves as Catholics. It remains the largest religion in the world. Roughly two-thirds of the world's countries have Christian majorities. Due to the large number of Christian majority countries, differing groups of Christians are harassed and persecuted in Christian countries such as Eritrea and Mexico more often than in most Muslim countries, though not in greater numbers. According to PEW, the Middle East and North Africa have experienced the highest rates of restrictions on non-favorite religions for the last decade, being higher than any other region, each year, from 2007 to 2017. But it's the gap between this region and other regions where government favoritism is concerned that is particularly large: "the average country in this region scores nearly twice as high on measures of government favoritism of one religion as the average country