Christians are “gradually being wiped out” in Nigeria as millions face death, displacement and kidnapping from jihadist groups, several NGOs have told Newsweek.
“If nothing is done in the next few years, Christianity will cease to exist in Nigeria,” said Emeka Umeagbalasi, the founder of the local International Society for Civil Liberties & Rule of Law (Intersociety).
“That is the fear for most Christian Nigerians,” said Christian human rights lawyer Jabez Musa, who is using a pseudonym for security reasons.
“Gradually, Christians are being wiped out and churches have been destroyed,” he told Newsweek.
The situation in Nigeria made headlines after comedian Bill Maher said Christians are being “systematically killed” and blasted Americans for not paying enough attention to it on September 26.
The State Department has since told Newsweek that it is “deeply concerned about the levels of violence against Christians and members of other groups in Nigeria.”
There are conflicting statistics about how many Christians have died and how many have died as a result of their faith, making it difficult to say for sure. But International Christian advocacy group Open Doors lists Nigeria as the seventh-most dangerous place for Christians on its World Watch list and says “more Christians are killed for their faith in Nigeria than in the rest of the world combined.”
The Nigerian government has repeatedly pushed back against these types of reports over the years, saying in a statement last month that it “categorically refutes recent allegations by certain international platforms and online influencers suggesting that terrorists operating in Nigeria are engaged in a systematic genocide against Christians.”
“Portraying Nigeria’s security challenges as a targeted campaign against a single religious group is a gross misrepresentation of reality,” it said, arguing that Christians are some of the many people across all religions falling victim to terrorists operating in the country.
‘Christians Attacked Every Two Days’
Musa, an independent spokesperson for Open Door’s Arise Africa campaign, who often represents Christian victims in Nigeria, estimates that Christians are attacked in some way “every two days” in the Middle Belt, a term used to describe an area that lies between the predominantly Muslim North and Christian South.
The Middle Belt is the epicenter of violence in Nigeria for multiple reasons: it is home to hundreds of minority ethnic groups, it experiences frequent land and farmer-herder conflicts, and it is one of the few areas bordering the predominantly Muslim North with a significant concentration of Christians.
Musa described two different types of common attacks—one where jihadists will “come in their hundreds on their motorbikes with other attackers on the back with AK-47s and then descend on a village and burn, kill and ransack the village.”
Other times “very few of them” will appear on motorcycles, attack individuals in a few villages and then disappear,” Musa said.
It is difficult to know exactly how many Christians have been killed in these types of attacks, and how many of these deaths were faith based but, out of at least 4,476 Christians killed for their religion across the world last year, 3,100 of them were in Nigeria, Open Doors said in its most recent Watch List.
Meanwhile, 16.2 million Christians in sub-Saharan Africa, many of which are from Nigeria, have been displaced, according to Open Doors.
Since 2009, which marked the start of Boko Haram’s insurgency to establish a caliphate in Nigeria and the broader Sahel, Intersociety estimates that 19,100 churches have been “attacked, burned down, destroyed or violently shut down”—around 13,000 were counted between July 2009 and December 2014 and an additional 6,100 since mid-2015.
These were all in the states of Taraba, Adamawa, Kebbi, Borno, Kastina, Niger, Kogi, Nasarawa, Plateau, Benue, Bauchi, Yobe, Southern Kaduna and Gombe, according to Intersociety. Newsweek was unable to verify the figures.
This violence is being carried out by Islamic jihadist groups, including Fulani militants, Boko Haram and ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province). according to Open Doors and several other NGOs.
Christians, of which there are 106.6 million in Nigeria (46.5 percent of the population), are most targeted in northern, Muslim-majority states but both Musa and Umeagbalasi believe jihadist groups are preparing to expand the violence into the southern part of the country.
Both Musa and Umeagbalasi accuse the Nigerian government and security forces of not doing enough to help Christians.
“Because of the violence in the Middle Belt there are soldiers in most flash point areas,” Musa said. “But in most cases, when villages under attack call, soldiers or police come late for no explainable reason or they tell you that they do not have jurisdiction,” Musa said. “We have not seen these people arrested, investigated or prosecuted.”
Jihadists are “being granted amnesty, ‘deradicalized’ and brought back into the larger society,” Musa said.
Nigeria runs a program called Operation Safe Corridor (OSC), which “provides pathways for willing and repentant insurgents” and for “low-risk armed actors to disengage from violence and embrace peace.” It operates with the support of several international stakeholders, including the European Union and the U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.
The Nigerian government has repeatedly defended the scheme. In March, Yusuf Ali, coordinator of the government’s National Orientation Agency, told local newspaper the Daily Post that, although he had initial reservations about the program, he has seen that it is not for extremists but for those who became involved with jihadists after being abducted, coerced or manipulated during insurgent occupation.
There have been several mass trials of Boko Haram insurgents since 2009, with 125 convicted last July, according to Nigeria’s Attorney-General’s office. Before that, the last mass trials of Boko Haram suspects took place between 2017 and 2018, where 163 people were convicted and 887 set free, according to Reuters.
As of September this year, Nigeria has prosecuted a total of 700 Boko Haram members, according to the government.
But most of the violence against Christians in the Middle Belt is carried out by Fulani militants, Musa said.
The Fulani are an ethnic group that span several countries in West and Central Africa who are traditionally herders who travel seasonally with cattle. Some in the Sahel have taken up arms as jihadists groups such as Lakurawa, which Nigerian courts officially classed as a terrorist group in January.
The violence in the Middle Belt “has been perpetrated mostly or entirely by the Fulani militants,” Musa said. “These communities have been killed, displaced, ransacked and dismissed from their ancestral land.”
The militants have “taken over the land, built their own houses, renamed some of the villages and built mosques,” he said.
Are Christians Being Targeted?
Everyone Newsweek has spoken to agrees that other religions, including Muslims, are also affected by the terrorism sweeping the country but they still believe that Christians are being disproportionately targeted for their religion, especially in the Middle Belt.
The Nigerian government, however, has vehemently pushed back against these narratives, saying it “oversimplifies a complex, multifaceted security environment and plays into the hands of terrorists and criminals who seek to divide Nigerians along religious or ethnic lines.”
“The violent activities of terrorist groups are not confined to any particular religious or ethnic community,” Nigerian Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris Malagi, said last month. “These criminals target all who reject their murderous ideology, regardless of faith. Muslims, Christians, and even those who do not identify with any religion have suffered at their hands.”
He went on to stress the Nigerian government’s commitment to “completely degrading terrorist groups and securing the lives and property of all citizens.”
But Intersociety’s Umeagbalasi called this is a “self-indictment,” arguing that a country cannot claim to have “international religious freedom” if Christians and non-jihadist Muslims are killed on religious grounds.
“So if the government is saying ‘it’s not only Christians, Muslims are also being killed’ then it has accepted that Muslims and Christians are being killed on the grounds of religion, proportionality apart,” he said.
Newsweek has contacted the Nigerian government, via email, for comment.
Nigeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also spoke out against accusations of genocide against Christians in the country in March, around the same time as U.S. Congress held a hearing in which the Committee on Foreign Affairs’ Africa Subcommittee called for Nigeria to be classed as a Country of Particular Concern. This is a U.S. State Department designation under the International Religious Freedom Act for countries whose governments “engage in or tolerate particularly severe violations of religious freedom”—but the list has not been updated since December 2023.
Congress heard U.S. Representative Christopher Smith, the Africa Subcommittee chairman, who said: “Make no mistake, all of these attacks are based on religion, like I said, and diverting attention from it denies what we have seen with our own eyes. This is religious cleansing.”
But Africa Subcommittee Ranking Member Sara Jacobs also warned the same hearing: “We need to be careful in our characterization of this complex challenge. Roughly half the population of Nigeria is Muslim, while the other half is Christian and violations of this freedom impact both groups.”
Musa has called on the “international community to pressurize the Nigerian government to investigate and punish the perpetrators.”
“We don’t believe what the ambassadors from countries in the West tell their home governments because we feel that most of them don’t have the time to visit these areas (such as the Middle Belt),” Musa said. “They get their information from the government and the government is not credible.”
The U.S. State Department would not tell Newsweek whether it would reconsider making Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern.
“When making designations for Countries of Particular Concern, the Secretary reviews all available information and takes these determinations very seriously,” it said. “Boko Haram and ISIS-West Africa are designated as Entities of Particular Concern under the International Religious Freedom Act.”