Why violence is occurring in an area where Christians and Muslims live side by side.
A funeral for victims of an attack in Riyom, Plateau State in June 2026. csi
Nigeria is the country where more Christians are killed for their faith than anywhere else. Most of those killings and abductions take place in and around the Middle Belt, a band of states between the Muslim-majority north and the largely Christian south, where Christians and Muslims live side by side.
In this region, much of the violence is attributed to Fulani ethnic militias (FEM). Why these militias target Christians, and why their attacks continue, can be traced to the country’s history, its politics and the conduct of the state.
Nearly 60 percent of Christian civilians killed or abducted in Nigeria between October 2019 and September 2025 were in four states: Kaduna, Benue, Niger and Plateau. That is according to statistics compiled by the research organization Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA). Plateau, Benue and Niger form part of the Middle Belt, and Kaduna borders Plateau. Both Christians and Muslims live in these states, but largely in their own towns and neighborhoods.
Besides FEM, several armed groups operate in Nigeria, a federation of 36 states divided into 768 local government areas (LGAs). They include Boko Haram; the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP); Ansaru, a Boko Haram splinter group; Lakurawa, a relatively new terror group; Mahmuda, which is led by a former Boko Haram member; and bandit gangs.
Several of these groups have reached the Middle Belt, according to reports. Mahmuda operates in Kwara and Niger states; a Boko Haram cell is based in Shiroro LGA of Niger State; Ansaru has cells in Kogi State; Lakurawa has spread into the Borgu area of Niger State; and bandit gangs are active in Niger State.
Religion follows ethnic lines among Nigeria’s more than 250 ethnic groups. The largest are the Hausa at 30 percent of the population, the Yoruba at 15.5 percent, the Igbo at 15.2 percent and the Fulani at six percent. The Hausa and the Fulani are mainly Muslim, the Igbo mainly Christian, and the Yoruba are divided between the two faiths.
Estimates of Nigeria’s religious demography put the country’s Christians and Muslims at roughly equal numbers. Pew Research Center counted 49.3 percent Christian and 48.8 percent Muslim in 2010, and the CIA World Factbook estimated 53.5 percent Muslim and 45.9 percent Christian in 2018. According to the World Christian Database, Sokoto and Zamfara states in the far northwest are 94 percent Muslim, while Plateau is 60 percent Christian, Benue 75 percent Christian and Kaduna 35 percent Christian and 50 percent Muslim. The southeast and south-south are Christian-majority.
This division dates to the 19th century. In 1802 Usman Dan Fodio, a cleric of Fulani descent, launched a jihad against the Hausa kings and founded the Sokoto Caliphate, a federation of emirates that reached into parts of present-day Plateau State, according to scholar Benjamin Maiangwa. Britain later governed the North through the caliphate’s emirs, an arrangement that gave Muslim aristocrats authority over non-Muslims. It kept Islamic (Sharia) courts in place and at times barred Christian missionaries at the emirs’ request. The historian Chinweizu argues that many peoples of Kaduna and Plateau were never conquered by the jihad. Most of those peoples are Christian today.
Britain created Northern Nigeria in 1900 and Southern Nigeria in 1906 and merged them in 1914, according to Omo Omoruyi, a former director-general of Nigeria’s Centre for Democratic Studies.
In 1944 the Sultan of Sokoto told a delegation of southern activists that southerners who wanted a united Nigeria should first convert to Islam, according to James Coleman’s history of Nigerian nationalism. Omoruyi writes that the North then secured half the seats in the federal legislature by threatening to secede. In 2000, 12 northern states adopted Sharia law.
Maiangwa traces the Islamist armed groups to decades of religious politics in the North, including the campaign that brought Sharia law to these 12 states, and to poverty and unemployment that gave militant preachers a following. Some armed groups now seek to restore or extend Islamic rule.
Boko Haram demanded in 2011 that Nigeria’s constitution be abrogated and an Islamic state established. ISWAP operates as a branch of the Islamic State group, and Ansaru includes fighters trained by al-Qaeda’s North African branch.
The Fulani ethnic militias differ from these groups. They have no known central command, and they operate through kinship and pastoralist networks, criminal alliances and community structures. ORFA says they target Christians for their faith and Muslims, mostly Hausa, for being non-Fulani.
The legal scholar Kaniye Ebeku argued in 2019 that the militias enjoy impunity because of an alliance with Fulani who hold political power, among them former President Muhammadu Buhari. Ebeku identified Buhari as a patron of Miyetti Allah, an association of Fulani herders.
The Christian farming communities of Plateau State and southern Kaduna live on valuable land. Plateau’s altitude gives it a near-temperate climate, and the state holds tin and columbite deposits. Farming is its main occupation, and it is Nigeria’s most important mining area. Southern Kaduna produces more than 70 percent of Nigeria’s ginger. Christian farming communities there believe the attacks aim at religious conquest and land grabbing.
Christian leaders also allege a political motive. The Christian Association of Nigeria in Niger State said killings and displacement in Christian-dominated LGAs had reduced the Christian population. Nearly 47,000 registered voters in Plateau are displaced, according to Nigeria’s electoral commission.
The federal government has denied that the attacks on Christians are religiously motivated and has presented the violence as a conflict between herders and farmers. The evidence contradicts that description.
Between October 2019 and September 2025, ORFA recorded 2,602 Christian civilians and 257 Muslim civilians killed in Plateau. Christian community leaders and ORFA analyst Steven Kefas report that attackers target churches and Christians while sparing Muslim neighbors. The attackers occupy and rename villages. Local leaders cite this as evidence of a plan to take their land.
One reason the attacks continue is that the Nigerian state has limited capacity to stop them. Nigeria had about 371,000 police officers in 2026, roughly one for every 652 people, according to Foreign Affairs. About 100,000 of them are assigned to guard prominent individuals. The army, estimated at 65,000 soldiers, is deployed in all 36 states.
In November 2025, President Bola Tinubu declared a national security emergency and ordered the police to recruit 20,000 more officers. Between October 2019 and September 2025, security forces reportedly killed 19,594 members of armed groups, but ORFA concluded that they largely failed to intervene in attacks on Christian civilians.
Christian communities accuse the state of more than incapacity. Local Christians have told CSI that local authorities often pressure communities to bury their dead quickly and together in mass graves. The burials take place before any medical certification of death or post-mortem examination, which destroys the evidence a prosecution would need.
Local Christians have also complained to CSI that security forces rarely respond to warnings of attacks.
For example, survivors of the attacks on Bokkos and Barkin Ladi LGAs in Plateau State at Christmas 2023 reportedly said security forces took more than 12 hours to arrive. Residents of Riyom LGA in Plateau said the army ignored early warnings before an attack in July 2026 that killed nine members of one family. In Kaduna State, a former councilor in Kauru LGA accused the army of complicity after it failed to arrive in time to stop an attack on Naridon village the same month.
In September 2026 the Nigerian Bar Association demanded an investigation into the delayed responses, saying the killings in Plateau revealed “a seeming complicity or helplessness of the State.”
Scholar Ebeku found that as of January 2019 the federal government had never prosecuted any Fulani herdsman for the attacks on non-Fulani villages, most of them Christian, that had killed large numbers of people since 2015.
