Multiple Nigerian newspapers reported on an incident on Wednesday in which the Nigerian military attacked peaceful protesters organizing to demand the government act to protect civilians from genocidal jihadist attacks, which have persisted for over a decade with little government interest.
The attack targeted multiple communities in Katsina state, in Nigeria’s majority-Muslim north. The newspaper Vanguard reported that a “fresh attack by bandits” had killed at least one person and resulted in the mass abduction of 17 local residents in three communities and was the third such attack in a week.
“In anger, residents, mostly youths, took to the streets, yesterday morning, blocking the Funtua–Katsina highway to protest the incessant attacks and government’s failure to secure the area,” Vanguard narrated. “However, the peaceful protest soon turned violent when a combined team of security personnel arrived to disperse the crowd, killing one of the protesters in the process.”
Ultimately, Vanguard reported, “residents alleged that soldiers deployed to restore calm shot two protesters dead and injured two others during the confrontation.”
Another Nigerian newspaper, Daily Trust, reported the events almost identically. The Daily Trust quoted an anonymous resident that stated, “the bandits attacked two days ago, abducted people, and returned last night. That’s why the youths protested. Instead of calming the situation, the soldiers started shooting.”
“They still tax us to harvest our farm produce. Even after paying, there’s no guarantee we can farm or move freely,” another anonymous resident told Vanguard.
Neither report mentioned the religions of the attackers or the victims. The targeted communities being primarily farmers, however, and being forced to pay a “tax” to the “bandits” implies that they are Christians, as even the government concedes that the conflict involving the “bandits” often includes an element of the Muslim herders stealing land from Christian farmers for their flock. Katsina is a Muslim-majority state that has adopted sharia, the Islamic law, despite Nigeria nominally having a secular government. Sharia demands that non-Muslims pay the jizya, a tax in exchange for being allowed to safely live on the land in question; reports indicate that Fulani terrorists have imposed “taxes” on locals in Katsina in the past two months.
The reports follow an uproar in the country after President Donald Trump listed Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) for religious freedom on October 31, citing the ongoing genocide of Christians by Fulani jihadists throughout the Middle Belt and the nation’s majority-Muslim north.
“Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria. Thousands of Christians are being killed. Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter,” said in a message published on his website, Truth Social. “The United States cannot stand by while such atrocities are happening in Nigeria, and numerous other Countries. We stand ready, willing, and able to save our Great Christian population around the World!”
Nigeria has faced years of jihadist attacks on its Christian communities, mostly by the Fulani jihadist “herdsmen” in the center of the country and by the terrorist organization Boko Haram in the north. Boko Haram, once the most devastating Islamic insurgency in the country, has become less active compared to the Fulani “herdsmen” as infighting, triggered by the leadership’s decision to join the Islamic State in 2015, has splintered the terror syndicate.
The government of Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has flatly denied the extensive evidence of genocidal Islamist attacks on Christian communities, claiming that generalized “instability” exacerbated by economics and climate change are to blame for the violence and that Muslims are also targets.
“The characterisation of Nigeria as religiously intolerant does not reflect our national reality,” Tinubu said in a statement the day after the CPC designation, “nor does it take into consideration the consistent and sincere efforts of the government to safeguard freedom of religion and beliefs for all Nigerians.”
Nigerian media typically refers to the Fulani jihadists as “herdsmen” or “bandits” and endeavors not to mention the religion of those involved in the conflict. Locals have regularly complained that the government pressures them into not reporting the attacks and refusing to identify the jihadists’ motivation of displacing Christians, using generic terms like “bandits” to erase the objective of the attacks.
“People were even warned not to say they are Fulani herdsmen who have been causing these atrocities such that when you open the general media they are talking about bandits – bandits or they say ‘unknown gunmen’ or things like that,” Father Remigius Ihyula of central Benue state told Breitbart News in 2023, “so you read about bandits. It’s rubbish: they are Fulani men going about with cattle and with guns and killing people and the government won’t do anything about it.”
Trump, in turn, has threatened to send the U.S. military “guns-a-blazing” into Nigeria to protect Christians if Tinubu continues to refuse to acknowledge reality. Since then, Nigerian media reported local Christians denouncing that they have been threatened with arrest if they report jihadist attacks. According to an anonymous “youth leader” in Kaduna state, the government “is threatening us with arrests if we dare speak out” about the attacks, an ominous declaration days before reports of Nigerian soldiers shooting peaceful protesters dead.
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