There’s a genocide happening in Nigeria. While this may sound sensationalized, it’s a sober reality backed by years of data, eyewitness testimony, and independent documentation.
While Christians are being slaughtered, abducted, and displaced, another war has just begun. It’s a war of propaganda intent on convincing the world that nothing out of the ordinary is happening.
I’ve personally walked through ravaged villages in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, and I’ve seen the grief this denial causes.
Two of the most visible voices in that campaign emerged this month. African Union Commission Chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf told reporters flatly that “there is no genocide in northern Nigeria.” Days earlier, on “The Tucker Carlson Show,” attorney Bob Amsterdam, who was introduced as a defender of persecuted Christians, claimed that the crisis was “more tribal than religious.” Carlson nodded along, giving him airtime to minimize one of the world’s gravest humanitarian catastrophes.
Neither man mentioned that Amsterdam previously represented Nasir El-Rufai, the former governor of Kaduna State, whose administration presided over a pattern of lockdowns and massacres that left Christian villages defenseless against Fulani militant attacks. Under El-Rufai’s rule, entire communities such as Goska were burned on Christmas Eve while government restrictions prevented residents from fleeing.
These are just a few among many who deny the devastating conditions in Nigeria. Denial is the ammunition fueling this war of propaganda, and when it’s perpetuated by those in power, it becomes even more difficult to discover the truth.
The data makes the case. The International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety) reports that more than 52,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria since 2009, including over 7,000 in just the first seven months of 2025. More than 18,000 believers have been abducted, and at least 20,000 churches and Christian schools have been burned or destroyed. Open Doors International ranks Nigeria seventh on its 2025 World Watch List, warning that “jihadist violence continues to escalate” and that Christians “are particularly at risk from targeted attacks by Islamist militants.” These statistics paint a gruesome picture of the orchestrated campaign to eradicate Nigeria’s Christian community.
The perpetrators have said as much. Boko Haram’s late leader Abubakar Shekau openly vowed, “We will kill every Christian in the area.” His successors in ISIS-West Africa and radical Fulani militias continue to act on that pledge. The group times their raids for Christian gatherings, shouting “Allahu Akbar,” killing men, raping women, abducting children, and burning churches. This is targeted religious cleansing carried out with chilling consistency.
In Nigeria’s Middle Belt states (Plateau, Benue, and Southern Kaduna), the pattern is unmistakable. Militias descend on Christian farming villages at night, torch homes, and slaughter families. Survivors often return to find their farmland seized and their churches reduced to ash. Amnesty International describes a “mounting death toll amid unchecked attacks by armed groups.” The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom continues to designate Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern for “systematic, ongoing and egregious” violations of religious freedom (USCIRF, July 2025).
Yet voices like Youssouf’s and Amsterdam’s insist this is something else. They describe it as “complex,” “tribal,” “shared.” It’s a narrative designed to protect the powerful: Nigerian officials who have failed to defend Christian citizens, Western governments that prefer strategic silence, and media figures who mistake contrarianism for courage. Their rhetoric is meticulously crafted to conceal the truth and keep the world in a bubble of ignorance.
The facts on the ground are brutal. Earlier this year, at least 40 people in the Zike community, a group of Christian farmers, were killed by Fulani herdsmen who had their sights set on the Zike’s land resources.
In June 2023, coordinated Fulani militia attacks swept through villages in Plateau State, leaving more than 150 Christians dead and hundreds of homes reduced to ash. Entire communities were wiped out in a single night, while security forces never arrived.
In 2022, Deborah Yakubu, a Christian college student, was stoned by classmates after being accused of “blasphemy” on WhatsApp. Her killers walked away free. Twelve northern states still enforce blasphemy laws that can carry a death sentence, and Christians live in daily fear of mobs acting in God’s name but fueled by hate.
Under the U.N. Genocide Convention, genocide means acts committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” Nigeria meets that definition. Christians are targeted for their faith, their communities obliterated, their worship outlawed by terror. The government’s paralysis — and, at times, hostility — completes the picture.
It's not a stretch to call this genocide. Rejecting that term, as Youssouf and Amsterdam have done, is moral blindness. When influential voices repeat the fiction that this is merely “tribal conflict,” they give killers the one thing they crave most: the world’s indifference.
The genocide of Nigerian Christians should prompt the West and other nations to stand in support of these people and take action. Pretending otherwise will cost even more lives.
The graves across Nigeria’s Middle Belt are not imaginary. The burned churches and orphaned children are not political abstractions. They are the evidence of a genocide happening in plain sight and of a propaganda campaign working overtime to hide it.
The facts are clear. The question is whether the world will have the courage to face them.
Clint Lyons is executive director of iReach Global, a nonprofit that supports and advocates for persecuted Christians in Africa.
