A relentless and unceasing, bloody massacre of Christians being “killed for sport” is ongoing in Nigeria, while global news remains silent to the issue.
According to a recent article by Fox News Digital, which cited Amnesty International, in around twenty communities across central Nigeria, “armed bandits ran amok… killing more than 140” in a Christmastime slaughter.
Yet accurate statistics in Nigeria are hard to come by, and other sources claim the death count is closer to 200 Christians.
The nation’s religious demographics are stratified across an invisible line, indicated by the southern beginnings of the gray area on the map above. Nigeria’s north is predominantly Muslim, and its south is primarily Christian, in the country’s Plateau State. Christians are purported to represent some 46% of Nigeria’s population.
Along this invisible swath, over a hundred Christians were massacred by Muslim neighbors.
“There was yet another Christmas massacre of Christians in Nigeria yesterday. The world is — silent. Just unbelievable,” posted leading evangelist the Rev. Johnnie Moore on X, formerly Twitter.
The genocide of Christians by Muslims in Nigeria has been ongoing for decades. Since 2009, over 52 thousand Christians in the country “have been butchered or hacked to death for being Christians,” reported Intersociety, a civil society group based in Onitsha, Nigeria.
“The U.S. Mission in Nigeria condemned the recent attacks in Plateau State and expressed heartfelt condolences for the tragic loss of life,” a U.S. State Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital. “We are deeply concerned by the violence, and we are monitoring the situation.”
“Not a day goes by when Christians are not terrorized in western Africa in the most grotesque ways imaginable,” he continued. “Christians are killed for sport, especially Christian children. For every massacre which you hear about there are probably ten others which happened in the shadows. The death tolls are routinely in the hundreds.”
“Entire villages are burnt and pillaged. Thousands of churches have been destroyed. Children and women are hunted. Countless Christians have been kidnapped. I met one pastor whose two previous churches were burned down. Yet, he stayed in harm’s way because he was determined to be a light in the darkness, even if it [costs] him his life, and it probably will.”
An aerial view of destroyed homes after the attack. AFPTV/AFP via Getty Images
“There is a new, deadlier threat that can threaten both Christians and Muslims: the threat of jihadists,” Walid Phares, political analyst and expert in jihadists in Africa and in the Middle East, told Fox News Digital.
Phares has dedicated decades of his life to this issue and has authored multiple books about it, including “The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad.”
“Indoctrinated by the Muslim Brotherhood and trained by al Qaeda Africa, the Boko Haram from north Nigeria are gradually becoming the country’s ISIS,” Phares told Fox News Digital. “They repress moderate Muslims and massacre Christians. Boko Haram attacks the Christians in the Plateau [State] area in the center to remove them and seize their lands.”
Rev. Johnnie Moore, a former commissioner for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, president of the Congress of Christian Leaders and co-author of “The Next Jihad,” also provided Fox News Digital with his perspective.
“The single worst place in the world to be a Christian is in western Africa, particularly in parts of Nigeria,” Rev. Johnnie Moore said. “When ISIS was at its height in Iraq and Syria in 2015, terrorists in one single state in Nigeria killed more Christians than all of those killed by the ISIS caliphate in Syria and in Iraq combined.”
More than 52,000 Christians “have been butchered or hacked to death for being Christians” since 2009 in Nigeria, according to Intersociety. AFPTV/AFP via Getty Images
“There is an economic factor in the conflict, but economics are omnipresent in all similar conflicts, so this cannot explain the violence in the same way as the jihadi ideology explains it. The goal of the Nigerian jihadists is to expulse the Christians towards the south, then to eliminate them.”
“There have been hotspots of jihadist activity in Africa for a generation, but what we are seeing now is that these hotspots are converging into a piecemeal Islamic State, which exhibits all the brutality we witnessed in Israel on Oct. 7 and in Iraq and Syria 10 years ago.”
Multiple eyewitness testimonies from the Christmastime slaughter report horrors beyond description. Evidently, it took over twelve hours for help to arrive, because government troops were working with the attackers, said Ty Danjuma, former Nigerian chief of army staff.
“The armed forces are not neutral, they collude with the bandits that kill Nigerians,” Danjuma told a large crowd in Nigeria last week. “They [the army] facilitate their movements, they cover them. If you are depending on the armed forces to stop the killings, you will die one by one.”
Security inspects the scene of a bomb blast likely to have been carried out by Boko Haram. AFP/Getty Images
According to a State Department spokesperson, no group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
“Religious freedom is a key U.S. foreign policy priority and plays a prominent role in our continued engagement with the Nigerian government. We continue to have concerns about religious freedom in Nigeria, and we will continue to work with the Government of Nigeria to address religious freedom issues and to ensure all human rights are protected, including the freedom of religion or belief,” the spokesperson said.