"They Are Burning People Alive": Nigeria's Unspoken Christian Genocide

The West prefers to call Nigeria’s crisis a “farmer-herder conflict.” It is a moral failure that masks a systematic, religious genocide.

Overnight on June 13, 2025, Fulani militants descended on the village of Yelwata in Benue State. They were not there to steal cattle or dispute a boundary line. They were there to exterminate. As the recent Nigeria Team Report: July 17th, 2025 from Genocide Watch details, the attackers forced their way into homes, destroying them and burning people alive. The victims were Christians, and the dead included infants, the elderly, and displaced persons who had sought refuge at a local Catholic mission.

This was not an isolated tragedy. This was a data point in a “severe genocidal crisis.”

The Numbers

The scale of violence against Christians in Nigeria has reached a devastating new intensity, with extremist groups like Fulani militants, Boko Haram, and ISWAP responsible for a campaign of terror. According to the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety), as detailed in a report by Lyndsey Koh for Mission Network News titled “Report shows thousands of Christians killed in Nigeria this year,” over 7,000 Christians were killed in just the first 220 days of 2025. This is part of a horrifying long-term trend; Intersociety, also cited by Genocide Watch, estimates that at least 52,250 Christians have been killed since 2009. The global context for this crisis is equally stark. A UK House of Commons Library research briefing, “Freedom of religion or belief in Nigeria,” confirms data from Open Doors showing that the 4,118 Christians killed in the country in 2023 accounted for a staggering 82% of all Christians killed for their faith worldwide.

This statistical crisis is composed of relentless, brutal attacks on predominantly Christian villages. In June 2025, Fulani militants attacked Yelwata in Benue State, a massacre that Genocide Watch detailed in its report, “Fulani Jihadists Massacre Over 200 Christians In Nigeria.” Just a month later, as documented in another Genocide Watch update, “Nigeria Team Report: July 29th, 2025,” militants attacked the Christian farming village of Bindi, killing at least 27. This follows previous atrocities, like the coordinated Christmas Eve attacks in December 2023, which International Christian Concern reported left “Nearly 200 Nigerians Killed in Christmas Eve Massacre.” These are not isolated “clashes” but a consistent, targeted campaign of violence.

A survivor from the Yelwata Massacre speaks out: this video provides a first-hand survivor testimony from the Yelwata massacre mentioned in the post.

Here’s What Happened

In the West, we have settled on a comfortable, abiotic narrative for the violence tearing Nigeria apart. We call it a “farmer-herder conflict.” We explain it away as the unfortunate but inevitable result of climate change, resource scarcity, and desertification. This narrative is tidy. It is academic. It is the core of studies like Dr. Lucky Nwaoburu’s “Herdsmen/Farmers Conflict, National Security And Development In Benue State,” which analyzes the crisis through the “Eco-Violence Theory.”

This explanation is not entirely wrong. It is, however, dangerously incomplete. It is a half-truth that functions as a lethal lie. It sanitizes the evil. It mutes the screams. It ignores the moral and theological core of the slaughter.

To understand what is truly happening, we must first understand the psychology of group conflict. The Mercy Corps report, ‘Fear of the Unknown’: Religion, Identity, and Conflict in Northern Nigeria, provides a critical insight: the primary drivers of violence are “insecurity and a lack of trust.” This is the “fear of the unknown” that grips communities when civil society collapses.

The resource grievance is real. Andrew McGregor, in his report The Fulani Crisis for the Combating Terrorism Center, correctly identifies the pressures of “diminishing land and water.” But this economic and environmental anxiety is merely the kindling. The accelerant is a radical, eliminationist ideology.

The “eco-violence” narrative fails to explain the character of the violence. Christians are being slaughtered by Muslims.

Why, as Lela Gilbert asks in her report An Unrecognized Genocide in Nigeria, does this conflict involve the “widespread murder, atrocious maiming, gang rape, and the burning alive of victims in their homes and churches”? This is not the behavior of desperate farmers. This is the calculated cruelty of jihad. Christians are being slaughtered by Muslims.

What we are witnessing is the “hijacking” of a communal grievance. As McGregor’s report warns, what began as an economic struggle is “merging with jihadi efforts.” An ethnic group, the Fulani, has seen its traditional livelihood threatened. Into this vacuum of fear and desperation has stepped an intolerant, supremacist theology that sanctifies their grievance. It transforms their competition for land into a holy war, recasting their Christian neighbors not as competitors, but as infidels who must be converted or killed.

This violence is chillingly asymmetrical. It is, as Gilbert notes, “well-armed Fulanis upon unarmed and vulnerable Christian communities.”

The perpetrators are not just “unknown gunmen,” as the Amnesty International report Nigeria: Thousands killed, hundreds forcibly disappeared documents. The perpetrators are identified by Genocide Watch as “Boko Haram, ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province), and Fulani jihadists.”

A functioning state would be the arbiter in this crisis. It would disarm the militias, protect its citizens, and enforce the rule of law. The Nigerian state is not a functioning state. It is a failed state.

Worse, it is a complicit state.

This is the second, and most critical, moral failure. The state’s abdication of its most basic duty, the protection of its people, has created the “security dilemma” that the ‘Fear of the Unknown’ report describes. When the government will not protect you, you must protect yourself. Communities are forced “to form militias for self-defense,” which only feeds the cycle of retaliatory violence.

But this is not mere incompetence. It is complicity. The U.S. State Department’s 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Nigeria offers a damning assessment. It confirms that “prosecution and punishment for such abuses was rare.” The government and its agents are themselves responsible for “arbitrary and unlawful killings.”

As Lela Gilbert points out, former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari is of Fulani descent. This is not just a failure of governance; it is a tribal, sectarian failure. The state has, through its action and inaction, effectively chosen a side. It is allowing one group to annihilate another.

This is the definition of a genocide.

We must use the word. The Genocide Watch report calls the Yelwata massacre an “unmistakable act of genocide.” Baroness Cox, cited in Gilbert’s report, is unequivocal: the bloodshed “fits the internationally defined criteria of genocide.”

Some may hesitate, and rightly so. The term is heavy. As Stephen David explores in Biafra and the Question of Genocide, the rhetoric of genocide was used as a “propaganda tool” by secessionists during the Biafran civil war in the 1960s.

To acknowledge that history is a sign of intellectual honesty. But to allow that history to blind us to the present reality is an act of moral cowardice. The manipulation of the term “genocide” in 1968 does not mean a real genocide cannot happen in 2025. The evidence is overwhelming. The systematic targeting of a specific religious group (viz., Christians), the exterminationist violence, and the state’s willful failure to stop it all point to one, horrifying conclusion.

To call this a “farmer-herder conflict” is to participate in the lie. It is to grant the murderers the cover of ambiguity. It is to tell the victims that their annihilation is just an unfortunate externality of climate change.

This is not a distant policy problem. It is a profound crisis of human dignity, a test of our own moral foundations. Our silence is complicity. Our sanitized language is an offense to the victims and their families who mourn their murders.

Now What?

The Amnesty International report demands that authorities “are brought to justice in fair trial, no matter who they are.” This is the absolute minimum for a just society. But the Nigerian government has proven it will not act without overwhelming external pressure.

This is where our responsibility begins.

First, contact your members of Congress. Call their offices. Write them letters. Demand that the slaughter of Nigerian Christians becomes a foreign policy priority. Demand that all aid be conditioned on the Nigerian government taking measurable steps to protect its citizens and prosecute the perpetrators.

Second, contact your local church leaders. Pastors, priests, and elders must not be silent while their brothers and sisters are being slaughtered. The Church is a global body. An attack on one part is an attack on the whole. Ask them to speak from the pulpit, to raise awareness, and to dedicate resources to organizations providing aid and advocacy on the ground.

Third, contact social justice activists. This is the ultimate systemic injustice. It is a crisis where one’s religious and ethnic identity is a death sentence. This is not a political abstraction; it is a matter of life and death.

This is a moral emergency. We must have the courage to call the evil by its Islamic name. And we must have the resolve to act before there is no one left to save.

Muslims are slaughtering Christians and the world is turning a blind-eye.