Based on more than 40 interviews conducted in Nigeria between December 2025 and May 2026, combined with reporting by watchdog organizations, U.S. government bodies, and Nigerian journalists and missionaries on the ground, this report calls attention to aspects of the crisis that international reporting is missing or downplaying.
The killing and abduction of Christians in Nigeria is extensively documented. According to Intersociety, the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, a Nigeria-based rights organization, at least 7,087 Christians were massacred across Nigeria in the first 220 days of 2025, with no fewer than 7,800 others abducted during the same period, an average of 30 killed and 35 abducted every day. Open Doors, in its 2026 World Watch List covering October 2024 through September 2025, recorded that of the 4,849 Christians killed for their faith worldwide, 3,490 were in Nigeria, 72 percent of the global total. The two organizations use different methodologies and reporting periods, which accounts for the discrepancy, but both confirm Nigeria as the deadliest country in the world for Christians.
The violence has continued into 2026. Intersociety reported 1,402 Christians killed and 1,800 abducted in the first 96 days of the year, from January 1 through April 6, 2026.
As atrocious as these figures are, the reality on the ground is worse than the reporting suggests. The statistics capture only part of the story. What follows are dimensions of the crisis that remain underreported or poorly understood.
1. The Violence Is More Normalized Than the World Understands
Father George, a Catholic priest in Dong, Plateau State, captured his community’s condition plainly: “We have become fatigued from complaining. Violence against us has become a daily, normal thing.” Ten deaths in a night no longer produced shock. It produced logistics. Paul, a local Christian journalist who covered dozens of massacres, confirmed the normalization extends to local media: “Many killings never reach the public domain. They do not report when the incident happens. They wait until it gets out on social media.”
2. Attackers Deliberately Target Christians While Leaving Muslim Neighbors Untouched
Across interviews in Plateau, Kaduna, Benue, and Kwara states, the same pattern emerged: attackers bypassed Muslim settlements and marched specifically to Christian homes and churches. In Nding, Barkin Ladi LGA, witnesses told Truth Nigeria journalist Masara Kim that attackers bypassed Muslim settlements, marched kilometers to the Christian community, and killed residents while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”
On May 13, a prayer group leader and his pregnant wife were killed in a majority-Muslim neighborhood; no Muslims nearby were harmed. Lamy Davo, whose husband, daughter, and grandson were killed in a Fulani attack, said, “I believe it was because we are Christians.” The most recent USCIRF report confirmed Christians have been “disproportionately targeted.”
3. Attackers Make Explicit Religious Declarations During and After Attacks
The Nigerian government frames the violence as driven by land and resource competition. Survivors are convinced that the motivation is religious persecution against Christians. One, interviewed in Jos, said, “They lined people up and shot them in the head. They preached Islam first. We buried 178 bodies in two days.” No ransom was demanded, no cattle taken. Seminarian Michael Nnadi was killed after refusing to renounce his faith.
Leah Sharibu, abducted in Dapchi in 2018, remains in captivity eight years later, the only one of 110 kidnapped girls not released, because she refused to convert. During the 2018 Lukfai attack, in which more than 250 Christians were killed, attackers told the imam sheltering women and children: “This was not the plan. Release these infidels for us to kill as agreed.”
4. Attacks Are Deliberately Timed Around the Christian Calendar
Mass-casualty attacks concentrate around Christian observances. Christmas 2023: more than 140 killed across Plateau State between December 23 and 25. Christmas 2024: 11 killed in Benue State. New Year’s Eve 2025: seven killed in Plateau State. Palm Sunday 2026: at least 53 killed near Jos. Easter Sunday 2026: five worshippers killed at two Kaduna churches, 31 abducted, 17 more killed in Benue.
USCIRF confirmed in its 2026 report that “militant actors have often carried out operations during Christian holidays such as Christmas or Easter to further maximize the psychological impact.”
5. Food Security Has Become a Weapon of War
Fulani militants arrive at night not only to shoot but also to cut, leveling fields of maize, tomatoes, and cabbages with machetes. Community leader Gastron in Miango reported over 23,000 farmlands destroyed in his area over nine years. In Kpachudu Village, Bassa County, herdsmen under armed protection unleashed cattle to trample and consume more than 300 hectares near harvest. “This is not a farmer-herder clash. It is a genocidal campaign,” said Dr. Joshua Riti, local administrator of Bassa County.
Multiple communities have reported that they have stopped planting corn because the tall stalks conceal attackers. Hudson Institute’s Nina Shea testified before Congress that the Middle Belt is Nigeria’s breadbasket and that as farming families are slaughtered or flee, “the region’s suffering is compounded by growing mass hunger.” OCHA projects 33 million Nigerians will face food insecurity in 2025.
6. The Everyday War in the Fields: Violence That Never Makes the News
Beyond mass-casualty raids lies a lower-level, constant violence no watchdog organization tracks separately: Fulani cattle grazed on Christian farmland, and farmers who confront the herders attacked, abducted, or killed on the spot. The fields themselves have become a conflict zone that international media has not adequately mapped.
7. Post-Release Financial Devastation Destroys Families
What goes unreported is what happens after a kidnapping victim is released. Livestock, motorcycles, farming tools, and land are sold to raise ransom. When victims return, families have no productive assets and are in debt. Steven Kerfas, lead researcher for the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa, stated, “Kidnapping for ransom is a strategic aim of the Fulani militants. They do it to fund their terrorism, but also to bankrupt the Christian community … by the time you release them, what do they go back to? Nothing.”
Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics found approximately 2.2 million individuals kidnapped in a single year, with 65 percent of households paying ransom averaging 2.7 million naira, an aggregate of roughly $1.5 billion USD, surpassing Nigeria’s federal capital budget in numerous years.
8. Displaced Christians Are Forced into Dangerous Mining — and Exploited There Too
With no farmland, some displaced Christians turn to artisanal mining, where Fulani-affiliated groups extort workers for safe passage and kidnap miners on the road. A report by ENACT Africa confirmed that displaced families in Plateau State “engage in mining in neighboring communities to make a living.” The governor of Plateau State suspended all mining in February 2025, citing insecurity and child labor. The China dimension compounds this: SBM Intelligence documented Chinese operators paying “rent” to militant leaders in order to gain access to resources. These fees fund weapons used against Christian communities. Once displaced, Christians are sometimes rehired as low-wage laborers on their own ancestral land.
9. Land Seizure and the Conversion of Christian Villages into Staging Grounds
Displacement follows a territorial logic: villages are attacked, residents flee, the land is occupied, and the settlement becomes a base for attacking neighboring communities. Truth Nigeria journalist Masara Kim has documented more than 200 communities seized and converted into staging grounds. In Lukfai, a mosque now stands on the site of the original church. Genocide Watch’s memo to the UN Special Rapporteur documented that since 2001, jihadists have invaded more than 1,000 Christian villages, over 200 in Plateau State, 300 in Kaduna, over 200 in Benue, 300 in Nasarawa, and 500 in Niger State, establishing “Muslim theocratic governments and taxation systems.” Intersociety reported jihadist Fulani herdsmen now occupy at least 950 locations in Nigeria’s largely Christian South Eastern states.
10. Education Collapse and Generational Poverty
Beyond targeted school kidnappings, educational access for Christian children in the Middle Belt has broadly collapsed. Parents keep children home because roads to school pass through attack zones. After being released from captivity or after a village has been liberated, parents often no longer have money for school fees, uniforms, and transportation to and from school.
Displaced children arrive in host communities without documentation and outside enrollment periods.
Save the Children Nigeria reports more than 28 million Nigerian children lack access to formal schooling. UNICEF found 56 percent of displaced children in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states do not attend school. Intersociety documented more than 10,000 Christian schools closed in northern Nigeria since 2009. Open Doors CEO Ryan Brown stated: “When a Christian farmer loses his land, when a Christian child is denied admission to school, when a Christian widow can’t get justice in court…that’s persecution too.”
11. Constrained Reporting Obscures and Enables the Violence
Mainstream media and international wire services systematically use language such as “bandits,” “unknown gunmen,” and “farmer-herder clashes” that obscures the religious identity of perpetrators. An internal Nigerian military-media WhatsApp message shows the director of defense media operations instructing journalists to avoid any acknowledgment of religious motivation. When the Kaduna State police commissioner was confronted with the January 18, 2026, abduction of 177 Christians from three churches, he dismissed it as “falsehoods peddled by conflict entrepreneurs” before federal police acknowledged the attack. ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN all failed to cover the Palm Sunday 2026 massacre. The New York Times covered it by attacking Republican lawmakers who called it genocide. Democracy Now stated Trump had “repeatedly falsely claimed a Christian genocide is taking place in Nigeria.” The omissions speak for themselves.
12. The Long Historical Strategy Behind the Violence
A Nigerian journalist framed the current campaign explicitly as the continuation of the 1804 jihad led by Usman dan Fodio, which established the Sokoto Caliphate but failed to penetrate the Middle Belt due to indigenous resistance. The communities now under attack—Berom, Irigwe, Tiv, and Adara—descend from those who held the line. Father George traced Christian institutional weakness to Muslim communities’ earlier access to Arab-mediated education, the integration of the emirate system into modern governance at independence, and the nationalization of Christian missionary schools in the 1970s. The House Appropriations Committee’s joint report to the White House stated that “Fulani militant and bandit groups are seizing land and resources and obstructing religious freedom to exert control and coerce conversion to Islam” and that the government had “failed to confront both the scale and the intent of these atrocities.”
Three distinct objectives are documentable, each supported by evidence of varying strength.
Land and resource seizure is the most provable. Fulani massacres since 2015 follow a consistent pattern: Christian farmers are displaced, emptied villages are declared Fulani Emirates, and land ownership transfers to Fulani cattle grazing. An economic warfare dimension runs alongside the killing: militants systematically kidnap Christians for ransom, forcing families to sell farmland; one Nigerian church paid $205,000 to recover 50 kidnapped members. By mid-2025, jihadist Fulani herdsmen occupied at least 950 locations across the largely Christian southeastern states of Abia, Enugu, Anambra, and Ebonyi, a territory with no historical Fulani grazing rationale, which defeats the resource-conflict explanation.
Islamization of territory is strongly indicated. The UK All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Freedom of Belief formally concluded that radicalized Fulani militants demonstrate clear intent to target Christians and Christian symbols, adopting tactics comparable to Boko Haram and ISWAP. Genocide Watch documented attackers shouting religious declarations, targeting churches, and singling out clergy. The Sultan of Sokoto’s counter-claim, that the conflict is purely economic, has grown untenable given the targeting patterns, the southern expansion, and the emirate terminology applied to captured villages.
Forced conversion is real but secondary. Forcible conversion of Christian girls is documented in Northwest Nigeria, and forced marriage into Muslim households functions as conversion in practice. The primary Fulani objective, however, is displacement and land seizure. Islamized territory is the goal; conversion of surviving persons is incidental. ISWAP has an explicit caliphate mandate and a documented forced conversion policy. For Fulani militias, the mechanism is demographic replacement, not mass conversion, a distinction that matters both analytically and legally.
13. Faith as Resistance, and the Church as the Only Functioning Safety Net
Across all interviews, one thread ran unbroken: faith did not collapse under the violence. Davo Wang, a youth leader in Plateau State, said: “We are still Christians. Nothing will stop us from following Christ. We will never renounce Christ.” Gastron, a community leader in Miango, has organized support for more than 400 widows and nearly 2,000 orphans, reaching close to 200,000 people with relief materials, with no government camp, no UN support, and no international NGO presence.
Open Doors documented that the Nigerian church supports widows, provides village security teams, and has built orphanages. Father Migap of Shendam said, “When we cry out ‘genocide,’ we are the ones who are suffering. We know what we are passing through.” The media reports the body counts. It does not report the communities being rebuilt, by faith, in the rubble.
