After American Intervention in Nigeria, Little Progress Is Notched in Effort To End Christian, Civilian Murders

A Christian woman in Nigeria watched Islamic terrorists murder her husband and two little children in front of her. Then they chopped off her hand.Chilling accounts like hers have reached Washington for years, yet the killing behind them has not slowed. On October 8, Boko Haram fighters destroyed a Church of the Brethren in Nigeria congregation at Hong, Adamawa State, and emptied eight villages that local clergy describe as entirely Christian. Church leaders there report mass burials. Last week, attackers there locked an evangelist, David Barnabas, inside his house and set it on fire.In Benue State, gunmen seized a Catholic priest, the Reverend John Inalegwu Otache, on October 13. Police said he was rescued five days later. Moreover, Fulani gunmen killed six Christians in Plateau State over the weekend of October 3-4, weeks after at least 12 died in Barkin Ladi. In Benue, three Christians were killed at Otukpo on October 7, and at least six more died at Ukum two days later, though some accounts put that toll at nine. The Christian aid group, Equipping the Persecuted, has also shared video of Reverend Ezekiel Dachomo sitting in another mass grave, weeping over the murders of his congregation’s members.Who is doing the killing, and why, depends on location, according to one analyst who tracks Nigeria’s jihadist groups.“In the case of Boko Haram, the driving force is primarily ideological and religious,” the editor of the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor, Jacob Zenn, tells The New York Sun of the northern-based, foreign terrorist-designated group. “Boko Haram’s interpretation of Islam regards Christians as infidels who must either convert to Islam or face violence, including death.”Elsewhere, Mr. Zenn says the picture is murkier. “In the Middle Belt, for example, violence involving predominantly Muslim Fulani herders and largely Christian farming communities is often driven by disputes over land, grazing rights, and resources.”Disputing the Number of Dead Nobody agrees on how many Christians have been killed, or why. The Enugu-based rights group International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, known as Intersociety says at least 3,083 Christians were killed and 3,193 abducted between January and August this year, with July and August the deadliest months. Its totals are among the highest in circulation. The group also counts 1,050 Muslims killed in the first half of the year.A Christian advocacy organization, Open Doors, found that 3,490 of the 4,849 Christians killed for their faith worldwide between October 2024 and September 2025 died in Nigeria.Ministry work carries its own risks, the vice president of administration at Child Evangelism Fellowship, Fred Pry, tells the Sun. “Three CEF ministry workers traveling to a rural community were kidnapped and held captive for six days before being released,” Mr. Fry says.Authorities at Nigeria’s capital Abuja, however, reject the idea that Christians are singled out. Information Minister Mohammed Idris has said armed groups attack Christians and Muslims alike. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom found in 2024 that extremist violence touches large numbers of both faiths in several states. Nigeria’s roughly 240 million people are split between the two religions.A former British diplomat, meanwhile, traces much of the bloodshed to the land itself. “The main driver appears to be the conflict between mobile herders and settled farmers in agricultural areas, with the herders being driven south by climatic factors, in search of suitable land for grazing,” a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Edmund Fitton-Brown, tells the Sun.“Because most herders are Fulani Muslims and most farmers are Christian, this gives the conflict a religious dimension that may not always be its proximate cause but which is nevertheless important and demands U.S. attention,” Mr. Fitton-Brown says.A specialist in extremist movements disagrees, and says faith lies at the center of the targeting. “What seems to be clear from the available data and reporting from Nigeria is that Christian communities are by and large targeted because they are Christian,” the senior director of the Counter Extremism Project, Hans-Jakob Schindler, tells the Sun.Under the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, the State Department can name any country whose government carries out or tolerates severe violations of religious freedom a “Country of Particular Concern,” which opens the door to sanctions. President Trump put Nigeria on that list last October. Washington’s legal test does not require proving genocide to qualify for sanctions. The Countries of Particular Concern standard “is based on the finding of egregious and ongoing violations that the government tolerates,” the director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, Nina Shea, tells the Sun. “In Nigeria’s Middle Belt region, that finding is irrefutable.”From Designation to AirstrikesOn Oct. 31, 2025, Mr. Trump wrote that “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria” and returned the country to the list it had first joined in 2020, before the Biden administration took it off. He also threatened to cut off aid and to send in American forces.Nigeria’s president, Bola Tinubu, rejects any unilateral American military action but has previously asked Washington for assistance. On Christmas Day last year, American forces struck targets in Sokoto State in what Nigerian officials called a joint operation. The strikes prompted questions in Washington about whether they hit the right enemy. In a March letter to the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, two House Democrats, Representatives Sara Jacobs and Jason Crow, wrote that experts had found no credible public evidence of a sustained Islamic State presence in Sokoto State. They asked under what legal authority the strikes were carried out. They also cited reports of unexploded or errant munitions turning up in communities with no ties to the group. About 200 American personnel deployed starting in February, most of them at an airfield in Bauchi. In May, a joint operation killed the man whom American officials described as the Islamic State’s second in command worldwide, Abu-Bilal al-Minuki. By July, the commander of Africa Command, Gen. Dagvin Anderson, said most of those forces had left. The rest of the main contingent was due out by late September, leaving small teams of trainers and intelligence analysts behind.Yet, the partnership has not ended. American MQ-9 Reaper drones still fly intelligence missions over Nigeria, and the two militaries now run a joint intelligence fusion cell. In September, an Air Force C-17 delivered military equipment to Nigerian air bases at Lagos and Kainji under a foreign military sales deal. On September 30, Nigeria’s defense minister, Christopher Musa, met the commander of the Army’s Southern European Task Force, Africa, Major General Matthew Brown, at Abuja to press for more joint special forces training, border surveillance, and help countering roadside bombs.“U.S. military assistance and operations may have achieved some tactical successes, including disrupting armed networks and targeting individual militant leaders,” Mr. Zenn observes. “However, these measures have not produced a fundamental change in the security environment.”Ms. Shea says the strikes missed the target that most threatens Nigerian Christians. “The U.S. strikes against the Islamic State in Nigeria’s north were not aimed at the Fulani militias, who are the biggest threat facing the greatest number of vulnerable Nigerian Christians,” she says.Lobbying, Legislation and a Looming ElectionIn February, Representatives Riley Moore of West Virginia and Chris Smith of New Jersey introduced the Nigeria Religious Freedom and Accountability Act, which would require the secretary of state to report on Nigeria’s handling of persecution. Eight months later, the bill has yet to clear committee. Abuja, meanwhile, has fought to influence Washington with money, signing a $9 million contract with the Washington firm DCI Group to make its case to American officials. Mr. Tinubu is seeking a second term in 2027.Weeks later, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom urged Congress to bar anyone from being paid to lobby for governments on the Country of Particular Concern list, pointing to Nigeria’s contract and warning that such governments use lobbyists to whitewash their records on Capitol Hill.“Congress should take up USCIRF’s recommendation and pass a law barring American lobbyists from representing the government of Nigeria,” Ms. Shea says.For one group working with survivors on the ground, American policy should be judged by whether it makes civilians safer, not by how many militant leaders are killed.“My assessment is that increased pressure and tactical successes have yet to demonstrate durable civilian protection,” the advocacy director at Equipping the Persecuted, Kyle Abts, tells the Sun. Washington, he argues, should insist on “equal protection for every Nigerian,” including “protecting Muslim communities threatened by extremists.”“Fulani-linked militants attack non-Fulani Muslims, and Boko Haram and ISWAP target Muslims who reject their ideology or resist their control. Recognizing those victims does not diminish the need to identify and address the specific targeting of Christians,” Mr. Abts says. He asserts that success will be marked by whether “Christian families can sleep safely, farmers can reach their fields, children can attend school, and displaced people can safely return home.”

After American Intervention in Nigeria, Little Progress Is Notched in Effort To End Christian, Civilian Murders

After American Intervention in Nigeria, Little Progress Is Notched in Effort To End Christian, Civilian Murders

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