Targeted Faith? Inside Nigeria’s Bloody Conflict
Ray Cavanaugh May/June 2026Amid political posturing at home and abroad, the complex reality of jihadist violence against Christians and Muslims has become harder to assess.
Nigeria’s crisis of ongoing massacres and near impunity for attackers grabbed U.S. headlines in late 2025. Even figures of American pop culture, including rapper Nicki Minaj and comedian Bill Maher, began speaking out about rampant violence against Nigerian Christians.
On October 31, 2025, President Trump formally designated Nigeria a “Country of Particular Concern” for repeated violations of religious freedom. Christmas Day 2025 saw U.S. missile strikes on suspected jihadist encampments in northern Nigeria. President Trump then followed up by taking to social media and wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, “including the dead terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues.”
These developments and the political rhetoric surrounding them have fueled an international debate over the extent to which Christians are being targeted in Nigeria, which at 240 million people is by far Africa’s most populous nation.
Persecution? Or Civil Conflict?
Nigerian authorities deny that Islamic radicals are seeking to de-Christianize the country. Even a few high-profile Christian clergy, both in Nigeria and abroad, have denied the presence of a widespread motivation to target Christians.
However, if you ask Nigerian Christians—who do not work for the government—about the percentage of attacks in Nigeria that have a religious motivation, they will likely give you a high number, with responses typically ranging from between 50 to 90 percent. Many acknowledge that competition over resources does play a role in these attacks, but not, they say, as large a role as religious animosity directed at Christians.
There is a profound disconnect between what you will hear from most Nigerian Christians and what you will hear from most major media venues, especially in the West. These venues tend to portray the ongoing attacks in Nigeria as part of a “farmer-herder conflict.” This type of portrayal would imply that each side—the predominantly Christian farmers and the predominantly Muslim herders—is something of an equal aggressor in the violence.
But that is hardly the case. Looking back over the past two decades in Nigeria, almost all perpetrators of violent group attacks are Muslim. The record shows, perhaps, a half-dozen incidents of young Christian men partaking in a revenge attack against Muslims shortly after a Muslim-perpetrated attack on Christians. Such attacks by Christians are few and far between.
Timothy,* a Christian pastor from northwestern Nigeria, has spent his life in a setting with an overwhelming Muslim majority. He said every Nigerian Christian he knows would contend that “radical Islamists want to Islamize Nigeria, and the moderate Muslims are in support of the plan.”
This reality became all too clear, he said, during the 2015-2023 tenure of former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari, a retired army major general who had previously served as head of state in the mid-1980s, when Nigeria was a military dictatorship.
Buhari was the son of a chieftain in the Fulani—an often-nomadic, majority-Muslim ethnic group whose presence in multiple countries tends to overlap with areas beset by jihadist violence. Upon becoming president in 2015, Buhari proceeded to allocate key positions in the country to Fulani Muslims, said Timothy, adding that some ministerial posts were given to Nigerian Christians “willing to be puppets.”
“The military and many key sectors of the country are largely controlled by Muslims,” said Tizhe,* a Christian from Adamawa State in northeastern Nigeria. In 2014 he was displaced for eight months after his hometown was overrun by the infamous Boko Haram terrorist group.
“The radical Islamic agenda to drive Christians out of Nigeria is not just a feeling,” said Tizhe. “It is something we have seen and experienced from 2009 to date.”
“My position is not driven by religious sentiment, prejudice, or hatred toward Islam or any religious group,” he said. “Rather, I am speaking based on lived realities and verified experiences within my region.”
Some will seek to diminish the religious aspect of Nigeria’s violence by pointing out that many of the victims are themselves Muslim. And this is true—especially in northern Nigeria, where some states have a 90 percent or greater Muslim majority.
Based on their proportion of the population in such areas, though, Christians are far more likely to be slaughtered or otherwise violated than Muslims. The Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa reported that, when considering the religious demographics of Nigerian states where attacks take place, Christians are killed more than five times as often as Muslims.
But it is, indeed, true that thousands of Muslims in northern Nigeria have been slaughtered. They died because they were unwilling to become jihadists. Even though both perpetrator and victim belonged to the same religion, there is a clear religious motivation behind such violence: Join us in jihad, or you and your family die, like those Christian infidels.
Alleged State Complicity
Timothy claimed that virtually all Muslims in Nigeria want to see that Christians are “forced to convert” or else “driven out” of Nigeria. These goals are among the reasons “they push for Sharia law in a secular country like Nigeria,” he added. Studies, such as a recent one conducted by the Pew Research Center, have found that a strong majority of Nigerian Muslims favor making Sharia law the official law in their country.
Tizhe seemed less pessimistic about his country’s moderate Muslim population than Timothy, but he agreed that many persons “in one way or another are supportive of the agenda” to drive Christianity out of Nigeria. He also agreed with Timothy’s position that jihadist sympathizers infiltrated the Nigerian military during President Buhari’s tenure.
There was even recruitment of persons described as “repented Boko Haram members,” said Tizhe, adding that “some of these individuals are now serving as informants and are involved in attacks against senior officers who appear to be serious about fighting terrorism.”
The matter of whether the Nigerian military and other state forces are actually recruiting former Boko Haram members is very controversial. The Nigerian government denies this is the case, but not everyone believes the official position. Some prominent Nigerian Christians, including an Anglican bishop, have publicly criticized the Nigerian government for their “recruitment.”
The Nigerian government readily acknowledges having a program called Operation Safe Corridor, which aims at reintegrating “repentant” Boko Haram terrorists back into civilian society. However, multiple reports—including those from lower-ranking members of Nigeria’s military—allege that Boko Haram members are abusing this program in order to receive material benefits. Debate persists about the extent to which these persons are “repentant,” as well as the likelihood of them reverting to their old jihadist tendencies.
Meanwhile, more Christians are killed for their faith each year in Nigeria than in the rest of the world combined, as reported by the international Christian rights organization Open Doors. Even though almost half of Nigeria’s overall population is Christian, millions of them are far more vulnerable to violent attacks than in countries in which Christians are a tiny minority.
Though Boko Haram is the more infamous name—particularly for their mass kidnappings of schoolgirls—a far higher number of killings in recent years have been perpetrated by Fulani jihadists, as reported by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa. Fulani jihadists have also expanded Nigeria’s radius of slaughter from the northern region, where Boko Haram operates, to the central region and even into parts of southern Nigeria.
For most civilians, self-defense options are limited. Nigeria has very strict gun-control laws, but the implementation of those laws is lopsided and typically focused on law-abiding persons living in permanent settlements, while itinerant herding communities, overwhelmingly Muslim, tend to avoid any such enforcement. Also, wealthy Fulani are known to have supplied their people with numerous AK-47 assault rifles.
Clashing Narratives
Amid these dismal circumstances, the website of the United Nations played things very safe politically by describing Nigeria’s atrocities as a “struggle between herders and farmers.” Some prominent Christian religious figures have taken a similar position. For example, in October 2025 Vatican secretary of ctate Cardinal Pietro Parolin said that the violence in Nigeria “is not a religious conflict, but rather a social one—for example, disputes between herders and farmers.”
Many Nigerian Christians found it highly regrettable that someone of such lofty standing would seek to diminish the hostility and danger they face. They were perhaps even more dismayed when a fellow Nigerian, the Catholic bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah, expressed his concern that a U.S. designation of Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” for violating religious freedom could harm interreligious relations in his country.
Kukah is the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto, a territory where Muslims comprise as much as 99 percent of the general population, according to some sources. With numbers like that, he almost certainly knows there are reasons to placate his neighbors. This same bishop has already faced death threats after speaking out against the 2022 murder of a Christian college student for alleged blasphemy against Islam.
Some prominent Christian clergy, though, have seemingly given up on interreligious niceties and decided to take a more direct tone.
Appearing before the United States Congress on March 12, 2025, Wilfred C. Anagbe, a Nigerian Catholic bishop, spoke of an effort to drive Christians away from their homeland: “The experience of the Nigerian Christians today can be summed up as that of a church under Islamist extermination,” and that the “quest to Islamize the land appears high on the agenda of some of the powerful and influential Muslims in Nigeria.” He added that the Fulani, in particular, “enjoy total impunity.”
Almost immediately after issuing these statements, Anagbe was personally threatened with violence. These threats reportedly came from within Nigeria’s government, specifically the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Less than three months later Anagbe’s home village fell victim to an attack that saw 20 people slaughtered, including several of his relatives.
Speaking once again before Congress on November 20, 2025, Anagbe said, “Violence is spreading southward, displacing millions.” He firmly believes such mass displacement is all part of the plan to take Christianity out of his homeland. As he rhetorically asked: “Who is killing the Muslims? Is there any Christian militia displacing millions and occupying lands in Nigeria?”
Anagbe is a bishop of the Diocese of Makurdi in Benue state, part of Nigeria’s Middle Belt region. In this region Christians are massacred by the village, even in areas with a significant Christian majority.
Daniel,* a Christian missionary in the religiously diverse Middle Belt state of Kogi, said the majority of Christians in his region believe there is a “radical Islamist agenda” using violence to “dislodge communities.” He added that the “primary targets are Christians,” but Muslims unwilling to radicalize also face lethal violence. “Both Christians and peace-loving Muslims are victims” of jihadist attacks, he stated.
Though persons of both faiths can fall victims, the perpetrators of group attacks are almost invariably jihadists. Daniel said the Christians he knows see “the pattern of attacks across different areas around the country” and believe “the aim is to silence Christianity” and ultimately expunge it.
He said many Nigerian Christians suspect their nation’s military “is compromised” in that there are high-ranking military officers with loyalty to jihadists and a vested interest in sabotaging any meaningful attempt to curb the violence.
Largely for this reason, Daniel said most Christians in his region want foreign intervention because they feel it would “confront the issues head-on” and be less susceptible to internal sabotage. He feels such intervention has the highest chance of bringing the ongoing violence “under control.”
Daniel said he finds it very offensive when people and media venues describe the ongoing attacks in Nigeria as part of a “farmer-herder conflict.” He acknowledged that in some parts of his country, resource conflicts do indeed play a role in tension and violence. But a huge part of the violence is “a deliberate attack on Christians,” he added.
“What do you make of my eldest sister, who is now a widow?” he asked rhetorically.
While traveling from northern to southern Nigeria, the bus in which she and her husband were riding was attacked and overtaken. This type of incident occurs with unnerving frequency and likely enters the statistics as general banditry, even though religion can mean the difference between life and death.
After the attackers gained control of the bus, passengers from the predominantly Muslim north “were released immediately,” said Daniel, adding that “the Christians were all taken into the forest.” His sister saw her husband slaughtered in front of her. She managed to survive, maimed.
“It’s beyond farmer-herder conflicts,” he said.
* Some individuals interviewed by the author for this article have requested anonymity because of the danger of reprisals.
Article Author: Ray Cavanaugh
Ray Cavanaugh is a freelance journalist based in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Aleteia, The Guardian, and the New York Times.