MILITANT groups in Nigeria are carrying out mass killings of civilians with impunity, and Christian communities are overwhelmingly their targets, the largest study of the ongoing violence has found.
Researchers from the Observatory of Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA), which is based in the Netherlands, documented more than 55,000 killings and 21,000 abductions between 2019 and 2023. Of those killed, 30,880 were civilians. Christian civilian victims totalled 16,769, significantly outnumbering the 6235 Muslims murdered.
Only a minority of the murders were attributed to Islamic State or al-Qaeda affiliates. The largest proportion — 42 per cent — are attributed to the Fulani Ethnic Militia (FEM), a religious terrorist group that targets Christian settlements, killing, raping, and abducting people, and razing their homes to the ground. The FEM includes a group known as the Armed Fulani herdsmen, who are frequently responsible for attacks on settled Christian communities. Forty-one per cent of murders of Christians were attributed to other terrorist groups, but these unnamed groups’ attacks were similar to those carried out by herdsmen and Boko Haram.
The data collected by ORFA show that, for every Muslim killed in the violence, 2.7 Christians had been murdered; and 5.1 Christians were abducted for every Muslim. When they were abducted, they were also treated differently, subjected to forced labour and sexual violence, the researchers found.
ORFA said that their data show that millions of people were left undefended by government troops, often located hundreds of miles away from hotspots. The data also show that attacks, including murder and abduction, occurred on average eight times a day every day for four years.
The report says that the country is caught in a complex security situation, in which militant groups act with impunity in some regions: “The most striking point is that the Fulani Ethnic Militia (FEM) are killing Nigerian civilians unopposed. Mass killings, abductions and the torture of whole families go largely unchallenged as government forces pursue targets hundreds of miles away.”
Communities are living in a state of terror and anxiety, with people most vulnerable in their own homes. “Many civilians lived in high levels of insecurity and fear of the unexpected. For instance, eyewitnesses talked about children sleeping in trees at night,” the report says.
“Attacks on communities were especially devastating for the victims. They often involved a whole spectrum of violence, suffering and destruction, leading to high numbers of forcibly displaced people. Their fields were destroyed or taken over by the aggressors (‘land grabbing’). Ransom payment added to the loss of livelihood and often drove people deep into a debt trap.”
ORFA said that it had highlighted the religious background of civilian victims in data because of the existence of contradictory analyses of the violence: some blamed it on land disputes between herders and settlers, while others suggested that it was rooted in an Islamic jihad. Such interpretations are “seriously misleading”, the report concludes.
“The violent community attacks in the North Central zone are often tagged ‘farmer-herder conflicts’ and attributed to climate change. The study shows this is often not the case. There is therefore a need to acknowledge that there are different dynamics and nuances at play in different locations.”
ORFA has called on the media, government, and security forces to avoid simplistic narratives. In the 17 recommendations in the report, it says there need to be peace-building and reconciliation programmes involving the government and faith groups, and that words such as arne (which is translated as “infidel”) and kafir (“pagan”) should be treated as hate speech and outlawed in the Nigerian Constitution.
It also calls on the UK and the United States to use their seats at the UN to seek a resolution, and invest in aid programmes to help victims of violence.