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(LifeSiteNews) — According to an April report by British non-governmental organization (NGO) Release International, Nigerian soldiers shot at students protesting over sparse military protection for a Christian-majority area which had been unceasingly attacked by the mainly Muslim Fulani militia.
Fulani attackers targeted Chikam village in the central Nigeria Plateau state on April 18, killing a computer science student named Dading James Jordan, as well as a mother and her child. On April 19, these attackers also killed 14 more locals in the village.
That same day, Plateau State University students carried Jordan’s body to their campus, but media reports indicate that Nigerian soldiers responded with fire, killing one student and wounding another.
Reports have surfaced alleging that the students had set fire to a military checkpoint. The military admitted that it had opened fire at “angry students” burning down the military checkpoint “when the soldiers tried to stop them from protesting.”
The Release International report stated that while Nigerian authorities “have acknowledged that two students were shot by security forces,” the authorities claim it was stray bullets that hit the students when “the army opened fire,” during what they labeled “emotional protests.”
The same report indicated that other sources alleged that more students were injured, slamming the army for “twice opening fire on civilian protesters in the space of a week.”
Release International said that “convoys of motorcycles, each carrying three armed Fulani terrorists, continue to wreak havoc by attacking villages.”
Subsequently, the British NGO urged for a comprehensive public probe into the episode in light of Nigerian authorities’ failure to tackle increasing allegations of human rights breaches by soldiers in the region.
For months, Nigeria’s Plateau state and its civilian farmers have been one of the many targets of attacks by Islamist extremists. Over the past year, Plateau State has witnessed hundreds of massacres of unarmed villagers by Fulani Islamist terrorists, such as the notorious Christmas eve 2023 coordinated attack by Islamist terrorists that killed hundreds. For months, swarms of armed, radicalized Muslim terrorists have laid siege to 151 villages and small towns in a bid to take over and control the land, according to Barrister Solomon Dalyop, who heads a large, majority-Christian indigenous tribal association.
Other parts of the country are not spared from Islamist attacks either. At the beginning of March this year, the Islamist jihadist group Boko Haram abducted around 400 individuals from a camp for internally displaced persons in the northern state of Borno. A few days later, 287 children were kidnapped from a school in Nigeria’s north-western state of Kaduna.
“Students were kidnapped from the school premises on Thursday morning around 8:00 am (local time). About 287 students are still in the hands of the bandits, 100 from the primary side and 187 from the secondary school,” the state’s police spokesman Mansur Hassan told CNN, continuing, “Over 300 students were initially kidnapped, but some were rescued.”
Targets of Islamist attacks are usually Christians and girls seeking a “Western” education, or a mix of both.
Take, for instance, the case of Leah Sharibu. In 2018, Leah was kidnapped by the Islamic State’s West Africa Province (ISWAP) group at the age of 14 with her 109 classmates. Although ISWAP terrorists murdered five girls and freed most of the others, they informed Leah that she would only be liberated if she renounced her Christian faith and converted to Islam. Heroically, Leah dismissed the offer and is allegedly still held under captivity in 2024.
Based on Open Doors research as of March this year, over 37,500 people are estimated to have been killed since Boko Haram’s insurgency began in 2011. Another report by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa lamented the kidnapping of a further 2,400 Christians over a six month period from 2022 to 2023.
Moreover, a report by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety) released in February 2024 stated that the year 2023 marked the bloodiest year of Islamic attacks against Christians in Nigeria, with over 8,000 killed and thousands more abducted and forcibly displaced.
“The combined forces of the Government protected Islamic Jihadists and the country’s Security Forces (NSFc) are directly and vicariously accountable for hacking to death in 2023 of no fewer than 8,222 defenseless Christians – covering a period of 13 months or Jan (2023) -Jan (2024),” the report, signed by the Director of Intersociety, Emeka Umeaglalasi, among others, claimed.
As per the Intersociety report, a wide range of actors, including Jihadist Fulani Herdsmen, staged the killings, murdering at least 5,100 Christians. Additionally, Boko Haram and related entities, Jihadist Fulani Bandits, and “Islamic-inspired” security forces were responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of Christian deaths.
Notably, the same Intersociety report stated that the January 2023 to January 2024 killings signified “the deadliest in recent years,” decrying the Nigerian government and security forces for failing to “rise to the occasion.” It posited that “the massacre of Christians in Nigeria is unmistakably systematic, well coordinated and premeditated; a fundamental part of the ‘State Jihadism Project’”.
“Nigeria has become the second deadliest Genocide-Country in the world accounting for more than 150,000 religiously motivated defenseless civilian deaths since 2009,” the report states, alluding to the year when Boko Haram began its campaign to launch Islamist rule.
In statements to OSV News, Umeagbalasi of Intersociety Nigeria said:
In Nigeria, more than 1000 churches were closed down last year. Since 2009, between 18,500 and 19,000 churches have been attacked and burnt down. In Plateau (state) alone, you have more than 50 Christian communities chased away from their communities by jihadists. The killing of Christians has continued because nothing is being done, the international community is silent.
Nigerian Bishop Wildred Anagbe of the Makurdi Diocese could not agree more, acknowledging to Catholic News Agency (CNA) that the Christian population in his country is being “gradually and systematically” decimated by Islamists through “killings, kidnappings, torture, and burning of churches.”
Also, Catholic Bishop Chipa Wilfred Anagbe of the Diocese of Makurdi in Benue state, Nigeria, previously declared that “if we keep quiet, we are going to go extinct.”
During such prevalent attacks, Nigeria’s Christian population is often specifically, though not only, targeted.
However, the West has kept mostly mum on the murders of thousands of Christians killed for their faith each year, with those who are more vocal still largely hesitant to explicitly name the ideological causes for such violence and killings.
In February 2024, the globalist European Parliament (EP) denounced the 2023 Christmas Eve slaughter of Nigerian Christians and urged for action to be taken against Islamist groups, blaming “climate change” and “environmental degradation”as root causes of these instances of Christian persecution.
In response to the EP’s condemnation, Dr. Georgia Du Plessis, Legal Officer for ADF International, said:
While we applaud the European Parliament’s recognition of the horrific Christmas massacre targeting Christians, we are disappointed that the resolution downplays the religious causes of the violence while highlighting issues such as climate change. Climate change does not cause people to massacre whole Christian villages.
During an EP debate, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) voiced reservations about efforts to gloss over the role of Islamic extremism and terrorism in brutal killings and assaults targeting Christians in Nigeria.
MEP Bert-Jan Ruissen (ECR) declared that “saying that it is a mere conflict between farmers and herders fails to acknowledge the other causes. It is Muslim extremists causing death and destruction.”
Similarly, MEP György Hölvényi (EPP) reiterated Ruissen’s views:
Blinded by ideology, some people are totally insensitive to human suffering when it comes to Christians. The timing of the attacks, brutal killings, and destruction of churches cannot be misinterpreted and can only be understood as the persecution of Christians and we should be able to say so.
Likewise, the International Crisis Group, backed by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and quoted by the U.S. State Department under Joe Biden, has alleged that “climate change has aggravated” “farmer-herder violence.”
“Increasingly, the security implications of changing weather patterns are visible in deadly land resource disputes between farmers and herders across the continent,” the group proclaimed.
Similarly downplaying the role of jihadist Islam in massacres of Christians in Nigeria, the U.S. State Department declared in its “2022 Report on International Religious Freedom: Nigeria”:
While much of the violence involved predominantly Muslim herders and, depending on location, either predominantly Christian or Muslim farmers … banditry and other criminality, not animosity between particular religious groups or on the basis of religion, were the primary drivers of intercommunal violence.
According to an article in Providence Magazine in March 2024, 62,000 Christians have been murdered in Nigeria since 2000, prompting former President Donald Trump to put Nigeria on its list of violators of religious freedom. Nonetheless, Biden removed Nigeria from the list when he assumed power.
In turn, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins slammed the Biden administration’s seeming lack of concern.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) was appalled by the State Department’s omission of Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) in 2022. In a press release, the commission declared that it “finds it inexplicable that the Department of State did not include Nigeria or India in its latest designations of Countries of Particular Concern (CPCs) under the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), turning a blind eye to both countries’ particularly severe religious freedom violations.” On May 1 2024, the USCIRF published its report including Nigeria as one of the countries with the worst religious persecution worldwide.
Former Rep. Frank Wolf, a member of the commission, denounced Antony Blinken’s failure to consider Nigeria under the aforementioned CPC list as “sorely disappointing.” Wolf, who acted as a Republican member of Congress from Virginia for years, was the author of the 1998 bill setting up the CPC designations.
He asserted: “Congress should exercise its oversight authority to ensure religious freedom is a policy priority in Nigeria [and] support appointing a Special Envoy for Nigeria [and the] Lake Chad Region.”
Christians, located primarily in the south of Nigeria, make up approximately 48.1 percent of the country’s population while Muslims, located mainly in the north, comprise around 50 percent.
Arguably, the silence of Western elites in the face of the large-scale persecution of Christians in Nigeria is linked to a refusal to admit the risks that unbridled Islamic immigration could bring to their very soil.
For example, a report on April 21 this year by the German tabloid newspaper Bild, quoting a study by the Lower Saxony Criminology Research Institute, disclosed that Muslim schoolchildren in the German state of Lower Saxony regarded religious rules as more important than German law, with 67.8 percent of schoolchildren polled declaring that the “rules of the Quran are more important to me than the laws in Germany”; 45.8 percent saying that Islamic theocratic rule is the best form of state government, with over half contending that it is only their religion that provides answers to the “problems of our times.”
Alarmingly, 35.3 percent of respondents in the German study contended that offenses against Islam and its prophet could justify a violent attack. Over a fifth of respondents stated that the “threat to Islam posed by the Western world” was a good reason for a violent Muslim response.
To boot, French broadcaster Europe 1, citing a recent report by the Paris Police Headquarters, stated that 77 percent of the perpetrators of the 97 rapes that were solved across Paris in 2023 were not French, and many were “addicted to drugs, unemployed and homeless”.
Fortunately, some Western government entities and international groups are becoming more vocal about the scale of religious persecution of Christians in Nigeria. In February 2024, members of the U.S. Congress voted to urge the Biden administration to confront Nigeria for its lack of freedom with respect to Christianity, and place the nation back on the CPC list.
That being said, if the West continues to overlook the rise in violence against Christians in Nigeria, or any country for that matter, it may not be long before the deadly erosion of the faith makes its way to local soil.
Help Christians who escaped Gaza: LifeFunder