'Pure Genocide': Christians Slaughtered in Nigeria and the Great Press Cover-Up

'Pure Genocide': Christians Slaughtered in Nigeria and the Great Press Cover-Up

Raymond Ibrahim

• Muslim militants slaughtered 16,769 Christians [in Nigeria] in just the four years between 2019 and 2023. That comes out to 4,192 Christians killed on average per year—or one Christian murdered for his/her faith every two hours. — Report, Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa, August 29, 2024.

• The violence has reached the point, the report says, that many traumatized Christian children sleep in trees to try to avoid being butchered during the night, when Fulani are most prone to attack.

• [I]n 2014, there were 1.1 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Nigeria; as of 2023, there are 3.4 million. — "NO ROAD HOME: Christian IDPs displaced by extremist violence in Nigeria," Open Doors, September 1, 2024.

• Behind all these misleading euphemisms, the facts remain: the murderers are Muslim and their victims are overwhelmingly Christian.

• The "pure genocide" of Christians in Nigeria, as it has been characterized by several international observers, is reaching unprecedented levels, according to two separate reports.

  "Countering the myth of religious indifference in Nigerian terror (10/2019 – 9/2023)," a comprehensive, 136-page report published by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa on August 29, 2024, found that Muslim militants slaughtered 16,769 Christians in just the four years between 2019 and 2023. That comes out to 4,192 Christians killed on average per year — or one Christian murdered for his/her faith every two hours.

  More than half of these killings (55%) were committed by radicalized Muslim Fulani herdsmen, who over the last decade have become greater persecutors of Christians than more internationally recognizable terror groups, such as Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) — although the ISWAP, too, are playing their part in the genocide: Fulani killed 9,153 Christians between 2019 and 2023; all other terrorist groups killed 4,895.

  The second report, "NO ROAD HOME: Christian IDPs displaced by extremist violence in Nigeria," published by Open Doors on September 1, 2024, states that the persecution, slaughter, and displacement of Christians in Nigeria is "unrelenting" and "a time bomb." Because "militant Fulani groups have deliberately targeted Christians or Christian communities, their livelihood, faith leaders and places of worship," Christians are becoming "an endangered species" in Nigeria, where they once amounted for more than half of the West African nation's population (the other half being Muslim).

  
  

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