I'm the Machine Gun Preacher who Gerard Butler played in film – here's how I survived ISIS and 10 assassination attempts

The Irish Sun

7 hours ago

A HOLLYWOOD star who gave up being a drug dealing bikie is now fighting ISIS through the dripping jungles of central Africa.
The Machine Gun Preacher is on a mission to rescue child sex slaves on the continent - and is has come up against the notorious terror group.
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Sam Childers in South Sudan
Credit: Caters
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The Machine Gun Preacher is on a mission to save children
Credit: Caters
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Childers was played by Gerard Butler in the Hollywood film
Credit: Alamy
The priest, real name Sam Childers, is battling ISIS in the Congo as he continues his holy war to save abused children.
He's famously known as being the inspiration behind the movie Machine Gun Preacher.
The film starred an A-list cast of Gerard Butler as Childers, Michelle Monaghan as his wife, and Michael Shannon.
Machine Gun Preacher told the story of how Childers came to be fighting in Africa after growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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Once a criminal, he found God, turned his life to charity work in Africa and dedicated himself to saving children.
Machine Gun Preacher - the film - showed him battling Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army in 1997.
Now he's released a self-made documentary - trying to raise money to take the fight to ISIS in Congo.
He said: "I'm not worried about dying. I'm 62 years old. The last thing I worry about is dying. I worry more about living than dying."
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After being hammered in the Middle East, ISIS turned to Africa and is now enslaving thousands of children as its militants rampage through impoverished areas.
Childers has a network of orphanages, schools, and farms set up across the centre of the continent.
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But he's come into combat with ISIS as they have expanded into Congo.
He said: "We don't want to see our children be kidnapped, sold in prostitution.
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"We don't want to see none of that so I'm willing to do whatever I have to do... and I'm willing to answer for it.
"They are murderers. They're killers.
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ISIS has brutally used child soldiers to fight its was
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Childers said he has battled other groups like M23
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ISIS in West Africa - where it is strongest in the continent
"I'm not afraid of none of them."
Some 5.4million people have been killed in Congo's ongoing conflicts since 1998 - but the wars have gone largely ignored in the West.
Three children were beheaded by rebel fighters in February and dozens more killed when they took a village.
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Childers' belief in God has given the preacher the strength to keep fighting - even against militant Christian groups.
The Lord's Resistance Army raped and abducted girls, mutilated them, and enslaved boys into being child soldiers.
He said: "I've been ambushed over 10 times. Been in over 10 major battles. They tried to assassinate me over 10 times.
"That's just in the Kony War."
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Despite the gun battles, Childers says that he was in more danger while a bikie and drug dealer in America.
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Childers has been working in Africa since the 1990s
Credit: Caters News Agency
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Childers became a heroin addict and bikie in his youth but turned his life around
Credit: Caters News Agency
He said: "I fought in guerrilla warfare, or been in war over 25 years, and I never was shot in Africa.
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"I was shot once and stabbed 3 times in America."
Childers said the soldiering was a means to an end - supporting the good work his organisations do through orphanages and farms.
"What you got to realize those rescues and to be active in stuff like that costs a lot of money.
"I have a lot of children and orphanages and children's homes that got to be taken care of."
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Now, he runs a private military company in Congo that works with local forces to try and save children.
Childers said many of the children he rescued were severely mentally damaged by their time spent in captivity.
He said: "They cannot be kept in a normal orphanage with other children until after one year.
"That's if the people believe they're doing well. That's doing the mental evaluations."
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Childers and Butler -- who played him in the 2014 film
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Michelle Monaghan and Butler in the Machine Gun Preacher film
Credit: Alamy
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Childers first fought in East Africa against the Lord's Resistance Army
Credit: Alamy
But Childers revealed that he preferred to work with children rather than adults, saying they could work through the mental challenges they faced from being victims of rape or violence.
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But it's not just ISIS that his charities are fighting, with disease and hunger also continuing to kill children.
Childers said: "So then we feed over 10,000 meals a day. The majority of the children we feed only eat one meal a day, and that's the meal we're feeding them."
Now, the preacher has released a new film trying to raise money for his work.
"Our goal is to do a hundred 1,000 downloads by the end of this year and that money's used for children, man, you know. And so, instead of telling everyone, hey, send me $20.
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"We're asking everyone. Look, you want to hear a good story. You want to hear a good story of redemption. You want to hear a good story of saving people's lives. You want to hear a good story of giving all."
Becoming the Machine Gun Preacher
Childers was born into a difficult household with a heroin addict mum and drunkard dad.
They were always Christians, but in his teens Childers got in with the wrong crowd, he said.
"I started doing what they were doing to fit in, smoking cigarettes, smoking marijuana.
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"12 years old: drinking, eating pills.
"13, 14 years old: snorting cocaine.
"Then, at 15 years old, I woke up one morning, and here I got a heroin addiction. You know, I'm shooting up cocaine, shooting up heroin."
Childers quit school and said he turned himself into one of the biggest drug dealers in Grand Rapids, running narcotics from all over the US.
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He said: "The only good thing was my dad brought me and my brothers up to be hardworking people.
"I always held a job, even though I was a cocaine addict heroin addict.
"But I made a lot of money selling drugs."
Childers said he always believed in God, but "I thought I had everything I needed.
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"I had money. I had drugs, guns, women motorcycles."
But then in his early 20s, Childers got into a bar fight that was so awful it changed the course of his life.
"There were big guys, tough guys laying on the floor crying, holding their guts in.
And I said that night, if I get out of here, I'm I'm done living this life."
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His charity work has seen Childers honoured with the Mother Teresa Memorial International Award for Social Justice in 2013.
What's happening in Congo?
ISIS has extended its bloody grip in Africa to the Congo in recent years.
The terror thugs are taking advantage of high levels of poverty and an already destabalised nation.
ISIS formally announced its arrival in the country - which it calls the Central Africa Province - in 2019.
It claimed another rebel group - the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) - as its affiliate in the Congo and neighbouring Uganda.
The ADF, originally a Ugandan Islamist rebel group formed in the 1990s and had already established a stronghold in eastern Congo's North Kivu and Ituri provinces.
The ADF rebranded to ISIS and adopted its jihadist rhetoric and tactics.
The group began releasing propaganda via ISIS's media channels, portraying its local attacks—mainly against civilians, Congolese soldiers, and UN peacekeepers—as part of the global jihad.
Hundreds of civilians have been killed in brutal raids, massacres, and bombings by the terror group.
The Congolese army has launched several offensives to knock out ISIS - but has struggled to fully eliminate them.