The plight of Christians received relatively little global attention until the Trump administration threatened to intervene.
Nuhu Dauda was on a missionary trip, about 125 miles away from his home in Plateau state, Nigeria, when he got a panicked call from his younger brother.
“He said jihadists had surrounded my home and were chanting that they would kill everyone inside,” Dauda, a 67-year-old Christian evangelist, told The Epoch Times.
The police helped rescue five family members before heavily armed men burned the house to the ground and killed a young fellow evangelist, he said.
That was in 2005.
“In the 20 years since then I have seen our people massacred,” Dauda said. “I saw my family members, in-laws, and friends killed. I’ve carried the bodies of my own and I buried them.”
The plight of Christians in the country received relatively little global attention until the Trump administration threatened to intervene amid a recent spike in violence, to prevent mass killings it suggested amounts to “genocide.”
The Nigerian government denies claims of religious persecution, rather framing the violence as a security crisis with “complex socio-economic and political roots” that impacts people of all faiths.
But the increase in brutal attacks on Christian communities by radicalized insurgents in recent years both parallels and intersects a broader rise in violent Islamist extremism across the region.
Boko Haram and Surging Violence
Dauda grew up in peace with Muslim friends and neighbors in the country’s fertile Middle Belt region. But everything began to change around 2001.
“It was so strange to us, we never knew that, to see our people killed in a community where Muslims were a minority but well armed,” Dauda said of radicalized groups that began attacking Christians. “They drove us out.”
While the threat has evolved, some observers trace the root of current violence to the rise of Nigeria’s homegrown Sunni jihadist movement more than two decades ago. That movement is synonymous with the terrorist group Boko Haram, sometimes referred to as the “Nigerian Taliban.”
Ebenezer Obadare, a senior fellow for Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, believes all problems are downstream of Boko Haram.
“It’s a religious campaign in the sense that this is mass killing initiated by Boko Haram, a group that targets Christians, targets Muslims, targets everybody—because it sees all of them as infidels, or apostates,” Obadare told The Epoch Times.
Boko Haram, which means, loosely, “Western education is forbidden,” has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States since 2013.
It embraces a strict interpretation of Islam that uses “extremely narrow criteria to define who counts as a Muslim,” according to a Brookings Institution report.
Formed in 2002, Boko Haram began an armed rebellion against the Nigerian government in 2009 and has retained a stronghold in the northeast, as well as in neighboring Chad, Cameroon, and Niger.
Since then, a mix of violent perpetrators with shifting alliances and feuds has emerged across the north, including the ISIS terror group, al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram offshoots and affiliates, as well as armed bandits, new cross-border groups and ethnic militias.
