The Unreported Dimensions of Nigeria’s Christian Genocide

From Modern Diplomacy and Christian Concern

A memorandum has been submitted to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, alleging that escalating violence against Christians and moderate Muslims in the country amounts to genocide. The submission urges the UN to investigate systematic religiously motivated violence carried out by jihadist groups across parts of Nigeria.

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.

“There is strong evidence that Fulani, Hausa, and other Muslim Generals in the Nigerian Army are intentionally preventing their troops from intervening to stop massacres of Christian villages until the killing is finished,”  The memorandum also claims that some jihadist groups have received financial backing from Fulani cattle owners seeking expanded grazing land, including individuals reportedly linked to the military and political elite such as former Nigerian president and president of the Fulani Cattlemen’s Association, Muhammadu Buhari.

…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

“Violence against us has become a daily, normal thing.” and ”

“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. . . attackers bypassed Muslim settlements, marched kilometers to the Christian community, and killed residents while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”  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…”

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

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.  “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.”

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.

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.  ““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 . . . “

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.

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. Save the Children Nigeria reports more than 28 million Nigerian children lack access to formal schooling. . . more than 10,000 Christian schools closed in northern Nigeria since 2009.

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.  Or as climate-related migration, historical communal conflict or criminality An internal Nigerian military-media WhatsApp message shows the director of defense media operations instructing journalists to avoid any acknowledgment of religious motivation.

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.

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; 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.

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.

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.”

The memorandum concludes by urging the UN Special Rapporteur not to dilute findings on religious persecution in Nigeria and calls for stronger international engagement, including reform of Nigeria’s security apparatus and increased global pressure on armed extremist groups.

It stated: “A brutal civil war by jihadist terrorists against Christians and moderate Muslims is underway in Nigeria. The genocide against Christians is gradual. It is what genocide scholar Helen Fein called ‘genocide by attrition’. “Diplomatic politeness must not become an excuse for denial or sanitizing of the facts of religious persecution and genocide in Nigeria.