A devout Catholic lawmaker is pressing the Trump administration to sanction Nigeria over the soaring persecution of Christians by Islamic militants. Meanwhile, the Vatican remains silent over the targeted mass killings and abductions of clergy and entire congregations.
On March 11, U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) submitted a resolution to the House of Representatives asking the Trump administration “to designate Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern for engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom.”
Asking Congress to overturn the Biden administration’s clean chit to Nigeria, Smith specifically accused “Islamic terror organizations” of carrying out “mass murder, rape, kidnappings, and other atrocities targeting mostly Nigerian Christians” for “over a decade.”
Islamic extremists have slaughtered more than 52,000 Christians since 2009, resulting in “mass displacement,” Smith warned. He cited the report “Martyred Christians in Nigeria,” published by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety) in April 2023.
Smith, who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, also pleaded with the Trump administration to consider its foreign aid to Nigeria if the country does not act to protect religious minorities and uphold fundamental human rights.
Since 2020, the U.S. has earmarked more than $3.53 billion for Nigeria, disbursing more than $2.24 billion in non-military foreign assistance and over $83 million for military aid, Smith noted.
Jihadis Aim to Recreate Islamic Caliphate
Northern Nigeria has seen the destruction of ”over 18,000 churches since 2009” in attacks by Boko Haram militants, Fulani herdsmen, and others, Smith added.
“Nigeria appears to maintain an open border policy that enables radicalized Fulani Ethnic Militants (FEM) and ISIS-linked extremist groups, including Lakurawa, to enter Nigeria unimpeded from Mali, Niger, Chad, and Burkina Faso,” he wrote in the resolution.
Smith explained that the “concerted effort” by Islamic jihadis aims to create “a Fulani-controlled empire modeled upon the caliphate in northern Nigeria established by Usman dan Fodio in the late 18th and early 19th century.”
The “ethnic and religiously inspired violence” in Nigeria “is causing unspeakable suffering and the displacement of between 3.5 to 5 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in northeastern Nigeria, and 343,000 registered Nigerian refugees in the Lake Chad region,” Smith said.
At a congressional hearing on March 12, Bishop Wilfred Anagbe, who leads the Catholic diocese of Makurdi in the central Nigeria, admitted that Christians are facing ethnic and religious cleansing from Islamic militants.
“The experience of the Nigerian Christians today can be summed up as that of a Church under Islamist extermination. It is frightening to live there,” he said. “Apart from the violent campaigns and attacks against Christian villages, there are now attempts by the Islamic Council of Nigeria and various Islamic groups to impose sharia law on the Christian populations.
“A long-term Islamic agenda to homogenize the population has been implemented over several presidencies through a strategy to reduce and eventually eliminate the Christian identity of half of the population.”
Nigerian Government Contests Religious Persecution
In a March 14 statement, the Nigerian government rebuffed Smith’s accusations as “inaccurate” and urged “the international community to verify information carefully before drawing conclusions that might escalate tensions within Nigeria.”
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs wishes to express strong concern over the recent wave of misinformation and misleading reports regarding the supposed targeted killings of Christians in Nigeria,” it said.
“While the federal government acknowledges the security challenges confronting the nation, it is imperative to clarify that these negative activities are not driven by religious bias, nor targeted against any particular religious group.”
The government continued to maintain the narrative that the violence is due to “contestations over land between farmers and pastoral herders,” and the authorities have “embarked on kinetic and non-kinetic methods and expedited the implementation of the national livestock plan.”
Persecution Report Debunks Nigerian Government Narrative
But “one cannot simply reduce what is happening in Nigeria to a conflict between herders who happen to be Muslim and settled farmers who happen to be Christian,” said Dr. Martin Parsons, chief executive of the Lindisfarne Centre for the Study of Christian Persecution..
A major research project Parsons’s organization published in 2023 showed that “the attacks by radicalized Fulani militants were following the pattern of slave raiding expeditions on Christian and African Traditional Religions villages in the Middle Belt, which occurred prior to colonial annexation in 1900, and which were legitimized by teaching on jihad in local madrassas.”
“In recent years a number of jihadist organizations have sought to radicalize some of the Fulani,” Parsons observed. “They have done so by seeking to reawaken the traditionalist form of Fulani Islamic belief and practice which existed prior to the commencement of colonial rule at the start of the twentieth century.”
The Lindisfarne report, “Christians at Risk of Genocide: Radicalization and Traditionalist Islam among the Fulani” notes that the
religious element of the large-scale killings in the Middle Belt of Christians and other non-Muslims by Fulani herders is NOT merely incidental, with the herders happening to be Muslim and the settled farmers happening to be mainly Christian.
The killings of Christians particularly have reached the point where in 2018 the Nigerian House of Representatives declared killings in the predominantly Christian villages of Plateau State to constitute ‘genocide.’
Despite this, NGOs and western media repeatedly insist that the primary cause of the killings is a herder/settled farmer conflict based on competition for scarce resources of water, grass and land which has been exacerbated by climate change driving the herders further south.
Despite this, NGOs and Western news outlets persistently argue that the root cause of the massacres is a clash between herders and settled agriculturalists, driven by the struggle for dwindling resources like water, grass, and land, which has been intensified by climate change forcing herders to migrate southward, the report explained.
“In this narrative, the religious factor is incidental, i.e. the herders just happen to be Muslim and the settled farmers happen to be non-Muslim,” it added.
Resolution Warns of Nigerian Islamization
According to the resolution, approximately 34,000 moderate non-Fulani Muslims have been killed in attacks since 2009, “from extremist groups for opposing radical Islamic ideologies.”
Smith slammed the Nigerian government for capitulating to radical Islamic movements, which often use blasphemy laws with harsh penalties, including death sentences, to target religious minorities and dissenters.
Twelve northern states have implemented Sharia law alongside secular law, leading to discrimination against non-Muslims and even Muslims who do not adhere to strict interpretations of Islamic law, the resolution noted.
Biden Backtracked on Protecting Christians
In May 2024, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified to the House Appropriations Committee that the murders of Christian farmers in Nigeria ”has nothing to do with religion,” Smith observed, pointing out that this “is inconsistent with readily discernible evidence.”
During President Donald Trump’s first term, the State Department in 2020 designated Nigeria a CPC, but the Biden administration omitted the nation from its CPC list in 2021, 2022, and 2023. In 2024, the State Department did not release a CPC list or its annual International Religious Freedom Report.
“For years, the U.S. State Department insisted the specific targeting of churches and Christians in northern Nigeria was simply a ‘socio-economic conflict’ — despite Boko Haram specifically claiming their actions were an Islamic jihad,” noted Parsons, a former aid worker to Afghanistan.
Pope Francis has also remained silent on the persecution, reluctant to name Islamic militants as the perpetrators. The Vatican’s former ambassador to Nigeria also downplays Islam’s role in the genocide of Christians, as this could “rekindle division” between Muslims and Christians.
“When we say a conflict is religious, we give it a moral justification,” Bishop Antonio Filipazzi told Vatican News in 2020. “This makes the solution even more difficult, because everyone thinks he is in the right because he does it in the name of God, in the name of religion.”
In June 2022, Francis and the Nigerian Catholic bishops refused to name Muslim Fulani herdsmen as the gunmen who slaughtered more than 70 Catholics in St. Francis Xavier Church in Ondo, on Pentecost Sunday.
Cardinal John Onaiyekan, the former archbishop of Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja, told Vatican Radio: “We should avoid saying this is foolhardy Muslims killing Catholic Christians” in order to avoid “profiling” and because such incidents “feed into the narrative of a Nigeria that I do not believe is fair, namely one that says Nigeria is a country where Muslims are persecuting Christians.”
Over the past decade, 145 Catholic priests in Nigeria have been kidnapped, according to Agenzia Fides, a news agency of the Vatican.
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.
The post Trump Urged to Sanction Nigeria Over Genocide of Christians by Muslim Jihadis appeared first on The Stream.
Subscribe Below To Our Weekly Newsletter of our Latest Videos and Receive a Discount Code For A FREE eBook from our eBook store:
