Numbers vary and are difficult to verify, but the Intersociety report said at least 185,000 Nigerians—including around 125,000 Christians and 60,000 moderate Muslims—have been massacred in Nigeria since 2009, when Boko Haram terrorists began their murderous campaign to set up a caliphate across the Sahel.

Jihadist violence continues to escalate in Nigeria. Christians in the country face systematic, targeted violence, primarily from Islamic terror groups such as Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), alongside radical Muslim Fulani factions. These groups explicitly target Christians through killings, kidnappings, sexual violence, and destruction of villages. The Nigerian government’s failure to protect Christians and punish perpetrators has only strengthened the Islamic militants’ influence.

The violence against Christians in Nigeria has escalated sharply since at least 2011, with documented killings and attacks increasing steadily. Data from Open Doors show over 41,000 Christian deaths between October 2011 and September 2024, highlighting a prolonged and intensifying crisis.

The steady influx over recent years of Fulani Muslims and Shuwa Arabs from neighboring countries adds to the threat of violence. Women and girls are abducted, raped, sexually enslaved, and killed by terrorists. In addition to being forcibly ‘married’ to Muslims against their will, girls abducted by terrorists have reportedly been used as human shields or leverage in negotiations.

Kidnapping for ransom is also used regularly, with the deliberate intention of destabilizing Christian families and the church. Abduction has become an industry, leading to intergenerational bankruptcy, in which a huge ransom is demanded from the family to return the victim. This is also the case for Christian parishes or congregations, whose priests or pastors are abducted, and the community is forced to impoverish itself to raise the ransom.

Amid the genocidal violence against Nigerian Christians, U.S. President Donald Trump has announced that the U.S. government is ready to protect Nigerian Christians through military action against terrorists if the Nigerian government continues to fail to protect its Christian citizens.

Yet, many Western mainstream media outlets, such as AFP, DW, and the CBC, have attempted to disprove the Christian persecutions in Nigeria, even implying the violence against Christians in the country is exaggerated.

Those mainstream media outlets are misleading their readers.  Douglas Burton, an award-winning journalist and managing editor of the news website Truth Nigeria that covers Nigeria regularly, told europeanconservative.com:

These media outlets would not make these claims if they had reporters in the killing zones of Nigeria’s Middle Belt, standing alongside TruthNigeria reporters. The nation is traversed by conflicts, many of which have ethnic or economic facets. There are two much-publicized ISIS-linked insurgencies: Boko Haram (from 2002) and Islamic State of West Africa (from 2016), both armed with armored cars, trucks, and RPG’s and heavy machine guns.  These insurgencies are chiefly made up of Kanuri tribesmen in the Lake Chad area of the country. What the U.S. government and Western media don’t get yet, although they probably will figure out soon, is that most of the Christians murdered in Nigeria every year are not killed in the northeastern part of the country (Borno State), which is 66% Muslim.

The Middle Belt is about 11 states, and it is majority Christian. In the Middle Belt States of Kaduna, Benue, Plateau, Taraba, Kwara, and Kogi, there are many violent events, and many are not even reported. In the Middle Belt, most of the Christian casualties are done by mercenaries paid by unnamed financiers in the Fulani-tribe cattle-herding oligarchy. The Nigerian government has never admitted this, but it is widely believed across Nigeria. It is documented by the Observatory for Freedom of Religion (ORFA).

AFP and other Western media don’t have a client base that pays them to go into the danger zones of Nigeria. TruthNigeria pays for this with the generous giving of small churches in the United States, and that redounds to their credit.

Burton explained how Christians are persecuted by Muslims in Nigeria:

1) Chiefly by mass attacks that take place at night on sleeping villages. More than 400 villages and towns in the Middle Belt have been wiped out by these attacks, which began in number on Sept. 11, 2001. Same day as the attack on New York’s Twin Towers.

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