200 Christians have been murdered in Nigeria after suspected Fulani militants launched a wave of terrorist attacks against Christian communities in the country’s Middle Belt in just one week.
At around midnight on Palm Sunday, April 13, gunmen, presumably from Fulani militias, attacked the villages of Christian farmers in Zike community, located in the Bassa local government area (LGA). The gunmen took the lives of 56 people, including 15 children, and injured nine others, while over 2,000 people were displaced.
According to Truth Nigeria, the attacks from the predominantly Muslim Fulani herdsmen left behind “the corpses of deceased women, children, and senior citizens in their homes, which they torched as they left the village.“
Relatives were severely traumatized as they had to bear the stench of the burning bodies of their loved ones from the smoking compounds.
The massacre on Palm Sunday occurred just a week after a similar attack, also attributed to Fulani jihadists, in five villages to the south of Jos, the capital of the Plateau State, that left 50 people dead.
In the neighboring Benue State, located south of Plateau State, gunmen killed 56 people on the night of April 17th into the next day in the Ukum and Logo local government areas, sparking the deployment of Nigerian security forces in the area.
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu denounced the Palm Sunday massacre and said in the wake of the massacre that he directed the country’s security services to investigate the incident and bring the perpetrators to justice.
Other Nigerian leaders, such as Plateau State Governor Caleb Mutfwang, described the string of murders against Christians as a “genocide.“
“I would say it unapologetically, what happened in the last two weeks in Bokkos is genocide – I say it unreservedly,“ Mutfwang said.
Meanwhile, Benue State Governor Hyacinth Alia blamed the attacks on "suspected herdsmen,” while the governor’s media advisor said the number of people killed could rise as search-and-rescue operations continue.
The repeated killings of Christians in the country’s Middle Belt also earned condemnation from several Christian leaders and organizations, including the Christian Solidarity International (CSI), which learned about the incident directly from one of their teams, who was on the ground in Nigeria when the killings unfolded. The group had already issued a genocide warning for Christians in Nigeria in 2020.
The continued violence between militant Fulani herdsmen and Christian farming communities in Nigeria’s Middle Belt has been a cause for concern for many Christian organizations and leaders. The longstanding conflict is often attributed to land and land-grabbing disputes, though several incidents have often taken a religious and ethnic dimension.
Nina Shea, former commissioner of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), testified before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa last March to discuss the ongoing persecution of Christians in the region.
