When the Boko Haram militants stormed his hometown on Nigeria’s border with Chad in December 2018, Usman Abubakar did not hesitate. As bullets popped in the distance, he fled into the bush.
He knew the stakes. Three years earlier, Boko Haram fighters in camo fatigues poured into the city, Baga, on motorbikes, screaming “Allahu akbar” – God is great – as they shot hundreds of people dead in the streets. Among them was Mr. Abubakar’s uncle.
Leaving everything was “heartbreaking,” he says. “But I had no choice.”
Why We Wrote This
Donald Trump says Nigeria’s Christians are under “existential threat” from Muslim insurgents. But experts say that rhetoric obscures a far more complicated reality.
For more than a decade, Boko Haram has terrorized communities like this one across northern Nigeria. This month the conflict captured global headlines after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to enter the country “guns-a-blazing” to root out the insurgency, which he describes as an “existential threat” to Nigeria’s Christians.
But that warning ignores a pivotal fact: Most of Boko Haram’s victims are Muslims, and its violence targets people of all faiths.
“They didn’t ask who was Christian or Muslim,” recalls Mr. Abubakar, who is Muslim. “They just killed.”
Marvellous Durowaiye/Reuters
This is not the first time that Mr. Trump has waded into African affairs with an oversimplified narrative of a complex political situation. This weekend, he said no U.S. official would attend the G20 summit in South Africa this month, repeating his widely debunked claim that white farmers are being “slaughtered” there.
His threats to Nigeria do not reflect reality either, experts say, but they could nevertheless shape it.
“When this complex conflict is framed as religious extermination, you embolden the jihadists and make them feel powerful,” says Malik Samuel, a senior security researcher in Nigeria for Good Governance Africa, a research and advocacy organization. “You risk creating the very religious war you claim to be fighting.”
Obscuring a complex reality
Mr. Trump’s first comments about a potential U.S. military deployment in support of Nigerian Christians appeared on his Truth Social platform on Oct. 31. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, he had just watched a Fox News segment aboard Air Force One about the killing of Christians by Nigerian militants. At one point, host John Roberts directly addressed him, asking: “Does the president need to do more?”
That segment – and Mr. Trump’s response to it – were the end point of years of lobbying. Advocacy groups like Christian Solidarity International and the Family Research Council have repeatedly sounded the alarm in Washington about Boko Haram targeting Christians, as well as about attacks on Christian farming communities in an area of central Nigeria called the Middle Belt.
While the violence they describe is real, these groups’ conclusion – namely that there is a “genocide” of Christians in Nigeria – doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, experts say.
Instead, in a country nearly evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, such attacks are part of a wider breakdown of security affecting all faiths, says James Barnett, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.
“What’s happening in Nigeria is tragic,” says Mr. Barnett, who specializes in African security and politics. But it’s rooted in weak governance – not religion. “Over the course of several decades, the Nigerian state has gradually ceded control of different parts of the country to different armed groups,” he explains. “Muslims and Christians alike are suffering from that insecurity.”
“Everyone has their stories”
Terungu Aondoakula is among those victims. On the morning of April 16, she awoke in her home in Ityuluv, a farming community in Nigeria’s central Benue State, to the sound of gunfire and screaming.
As masked men tore through the village, she crawled out of the back of her house, clutching her young child, and fled 11 miles on foot. She says she returned days later to find burned houses, killed animals, destroyed farms, and the bodies of her neighbors. “I lost everything,” Ms. Aondoakula says softly.
The residents of the mostly Christian village suspected the the attackers were part of a collection of loosely organized local militias linked to the Fulani, a mostly Muslim ethnic group that has traditionally herded livestock north of the Middle Belt.
In recent years, however, as desertification and drought have pushed them southward in search of pasture, they increasingly encroach on Middle Belt farmlands. The resulting clashes over shrinking resources – sometimes mistakenly categorized as religious violence – have killed thousands and displaced entire villages.
Meanwhile, in the northwest, Nigerian security forces have long struggled to patrol the massive territory where Boko Haram roams, allowing the group to attack anyone they deem an enemy of their war for religious purity – including moderate Muslims. Between 2011 and 2020, Boko Haram attacked 72 mosques, according to the U.S.’s Council on Foreign Relations’ Nigeria Security Tracker, killing thousands of Muslims.
Those statistics are a reminder that while religion is often Nigeria’s most visible dividing line, it is rarely the true cause of its violence, says Mr. Samuel of Good Governance Africa. Boko Haram’s “violence does not discriminate.”
Local faith leaders warn that the “us versus them” narrative threatens to undo years of reconciliation work. At a press conference in October, Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah, one of Nigeria’s most prominent Catholic clerics, urged the U.S. not to redesignate Nigeria a “country of particular concern” over religious freedom.
Listing Nigeria as a country where Christianity is under threat would “only make our work in the area of dialogue among religious leaders even harder,” he said. “It will increase tensions, sow doubt, open windows of suspicion and fear, and allow criminals and perpetrators of violence to exploit divisions.”
A few days later, Mr. Trump announced that Nigeria was once again on the countries of concern “special watch list.”
As for Mr. Abubakar, who fled a Boko Haram attack in 2018, he eventually settled in a town called Minna, where he built a modest life as a commercial motorcycle driver. Today, one of his regular passengers is a pastor’s son. Another is a Muslim trader who fled the state of Zamfara after bandit raids.
“If you come here,” he says, “everyone has their stories.”
