Christians in Nigeria face abductions, torture, rape, and murder on a “daily” basis at the hands of hordes of armed Fulani jihadists, a lawyer working in the country’s Middle Belt told Breitbart News in an exclusive conversation on Monday.
The lawyer, using the pseudonym Jabez Musa to protect himself and his family, shared horrifying anecdotes from the local Christians in the region who have survived abductions for ransom, the storming and destruction of their villages, and slaughter of their families, and are demanding the Nigerian government fulfill its constitutional duty to protect citizens. Nigeria has been plagued by jihadist violence against Christians for over a decade, with varying circumstances and perpetrators depending on the region. In the Muslim-majority north, groups such as Boko Haram and Islamic State-affiliated terrorists have fueled an ongoing insurgency with no end in sight.
Nigeria is regularly identified as the most dangerous place in the world to practice Christianity, deadlier than notoriously repressive places such as North Korea and Afghanistan in part due to the large Christian population creating more targets for prospective killers. The Christian humanitarian aid organization Open Doors, which facilitated the conversation with Jabez Musa on Monday, ranked Nigeria the number seven most repressive country in the world for Christianity in its 2026 World Watch List, citing mass killings, displacements, and general violence by jihadists against Christians.
Christians enduring this horrifying situation are asking their brothers and sisters around the world to pray for them and pressure the Nigerian government to act, Musa said, suggesting that Abuja has the capability, but not the will, to protect Christians without global calls to do so.
In the Middle Belt, where the Muslim northern region meets the majority-Christian south and locals are largely Christian, organized jihadist militias, many identified as belonging to the large Fulani ethnic tribe, have waged a campaign of ethnic cleansing, destroying Christian communities and taking their land. Nigerian government officials have taken little action to protect those in the Middle Belt and go out of their way to deny the genocidal nature of the attacks, blaming instead “climate change” and reportedly investing in public relations campaigns to drown out reports of the reality on the ground for Christians. As part of the “climate change” excuse, the terrorists are sometimes referred to as “Fulani herdsmen,” framed as being in conflict with Christian farmers for the use of land.
“The characterisation of Nigeria as religiously intolerant does not reflect our national reality,” President Bola Tinubu plainly declared in November 2025, responding to President Donald Trump’s call for a serious response to the mass extermination of Christians in the country.
Jabez Musa described the situation in the Middle Belt as consistently deadly for Christians.
“In my local government, here in the Middle Belt, just last week a pastor’s son was killed and it is a daily occurrence: killings by the militant Fulanis and ancestral lands have been taken over and the situation is almost the same with other states in the Middle Belt generally,” he told Breitbart News, “whether it is Plateau, whether it is Benue, Nasarawa, southern Kaduna, Taraba, and states like that. Killings have not abated. They come en masse, at times a few individuals, so that is the situation here.”
Musa emphasized that the attacks are not isolated instances of “banditry,” as is often reported in Nigerian media, but coordinated militant invasions of communities.
“When you give them the name ‘hoodlums’ or ‘bandits,’ then the criminality is not a severe one,” Musa explained, “but what we see here — these are people who are militant and they kill.”
“They come in their hundreds on their motorbikes and their fellow attackers on the bike and with their AK-47 machine guns and attack a village or a community, kill them, and either take over or kill them, come back again, then take over the place,” he continued. “So it is more than banditry; they are more than bandits.”
Musa emphasized that hundreds of attackers storm villages at once, with little response from the Nigerian military.
“You have, you know, platoons of soldiers all over the place, and in most cases when they receive reports of attack, they have excuses,” he shared. “They could say, well, they have to wait for a command by the higher authority for them to act, and when they come — if they come at all — they come when they attacked and damage has been done, people have been killed. But at times they don’t come at all.”
To finance their attacks, the jihadists often engage in abductions. Mass abductions such as those of the Chibok girls in northeast Nigeria by Boko Haram in 2014 — which remains unresolved — made international headlines, but so many similar instances occur that not all receive similar attention. Musa explained that the terrorists have been so successful in abducting for ransom that the kidnapping problem has expanded to including individuals with no known political or religious motivation, common criminals who are taking advantage of the government’s inaction to engage in their own abductions. The majority, however, he says, are kidnappings by organized militias for ransom.
The victims, he lamented, “go through serious trauma” and require extensive help to return to their daily lives if they survive being taken. Sharing the story of one family that was abducted, Musa narrated that a survivor said of he and his wife, “They kidnapped us, sleep with her whenever they feel the urge, sometimes while the children watch… if I protest, I will be shot.”
“The same thing happened to all the women in the village” where that man was from, he added.
In another instance, Musa shared, a seven-year-old boy abducted and taken to the bush was forced to choose between death and cannibalism.
“There is this story of a 7-year-old boy who was kidnapped and because, for lack of food in where the kidnappers kept him in the bush, and he had to eat human flesh to survive,” Musa shared.
Another survivor, a woman who became pregnant in captivity, shared that she “had to have her umbilical cord cut by the teeth of another woman, that the militants forced her to put her teeth so that she could cut the umbilical cord.”
Musa says Christians are not attacking or posing any threat to the Fulani or any other Islamist militant group operating in Nigeria — “they can defend themselves, at best” — and they are demanding a serious government effort to protect their lives.
“What we want, what Christians want and every meaningful Nigerian wants, is that there should be peace, there should be less attacks or no attacks at all, whether on Christians or any other religious group in Nigeria,” he explained. “We want the government to deal with these militants that have denied them peace.”
“We want the Nigerian government to act and, when it acts, let them act fast by protecting the rights of those who are being attacked every day,” he explained. “And then those who have lost their ancestral lands and their homes should be supported by the government.”
As calls for the government — whether under current President Tinubu or his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, under whom jihadist activity grew exponentially — to take meaningful action to protect Christians have historically not resulted in significant progress, Musa is also urging Christians around the world to speak up on their behalf and help nudge the government to use the resources they have effectively.
“We want Christians all over the world to know what is happening in Nigeria, to be abreast with the happenings daily and to know that Christians are being severely persecuted,” Musa told Breitbart News. “The persecution includes killings, includes discriminations in all forms, and, again, Christians are denied their rights in some of the Muslim states in Nigeria.”
Musa noted that, in addition to active terrorist attacks on Christians, those who live in 12 of the country’s states are now officially subject to sharia, or Islamic law, contrary to the constitution of Nigeria. Musa noted that Christians are also often denied legal paperwork to build churches and places of worship in states run by Muslim leaders and face other discrimination even when not actively attacked.
“We want Christians all over to pray for Christians in Nigeria, and the Bible says watch and pray. Besides the prayer, the watch aspect is for Christians in other jurisdictions to urge their representatives to put pressure on the Nigerian government to act and to end the violence,” he suggested.
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.
Read the full article here